should ever think to deceive God by
playing the parrot or the hypocrite! There are many who make the fatal
mistake of substituting profession for reality; and in a community who
hold religion in high regard there may be politicians who will take
this course in the hope of winning their fellow-men. If they succeed,
they only effect a selfish purpose; they do not illustrate the
influence of religion.

Neither is it an attention to forms, however sincere, nor a use of
institutions, however constant, that will satisfy the demands of
Christianity. It requires something more than reverence for the means
by which it binds its power upon the disciple. The age in which faith
terminates in the _means_ of religion is the precursor of an age of
unbelief. Ceremonies are but the ghosts of dead professions, unless a
living faith convert them into ministers of goodness. Forms are
needed, institutions are all but essential; but they are only the
garments in which the Divine spirit of religion must be clad for its
exposure to a cold and ungenial world. Many are there who look with
profound respect upon the dress, but think not whether it covers a
divinity or a fiction. How have men--great statesmen and small
politicians as well as others--praised the Established Church of
England, and actually stood in awe of its majesty, when the thought of
its spiritual relation to themselves or any one else had perhaps never
crossed their minds.

It is not reverence at certain times--a periodical service--by which
men are required to prove themselves disciples of Christ.
Righteousness, holiness, is not confined to any hour or place. The
sanctuary whose walls the hands of labour have raised, is not the only
house of God. There is a temple which the Divine Architect has reared,
whose walls are immortal, in which his worship must be maintained by
faculties ever conscious of his presence. There is an altar, the altar
of the heart, on which a perpetual sacrifice must be presented.

That sacrifice too must be a whole burnt-offering. The man must give
himself to God, "a living sacrifice," in body and in soul, which is
but his "reasonable service." I pause not from my original purpose, to
show how reasonable; but I insist upon the truth that a partial
obedience, in whatever sense it be partial, will not meet the
requisitions of Christianity. It is neither a part of human nature,
nor a part of human life, which must be devoted to religion; but the
whole--t