ve and inward
peace, and instead of inspiring, heightening, and purifying man's soul,
it bends all its energies in the vain attempt to alter the capricious
attitude of the superior Being who scares and terrifies men. It is,
however, a very subtle spirit and one hard to eradicate. It invades
our religion even when we are least aware of it: "it enters into our
chambers, creeps into our clothes, twines about our secret devotions,
and actuates our forms of belief and orthodox opinions."[17]

Legalistic religion, or the "covenant of works," is much of a piece
with superstition. It, again, is always a burden to be borne. Its
mark is "drudgery and servility." It is a "lean and lifeless form of
external performances." Its "law" is always something outside the soul
itself. It is a way of acquiring "merit," of getting reckoned among
"heaven's darlings," but it is not a way of life or expansion or power
or joy.[18]

This "dead" legalistic form of religion is, however, not merely a thing
of antiquity, of some early "dispensation" in the long stretch of years
called "B.C." Like superstition, legalistic religion also has "crept
into our clothes" and "twined about our secret devotions." The
"gospel" can be made, and has often enough been made, "as legal as ever
the religion of the Jews was." The gospel becomes legal, in Smith's
sense, wherever it is treated "as something onely without us," "as a
meer historical story or account," or as a collection of book-facts, or
"as _credenda_ propounded for us to believe," or when we attempt to
"make Christ's righteousness serve onely as our outward
_covering_."[19] "Some of our {310} _Dogmata_," he thinks, "and
Notions of Justification puff us up in far higher and goodlier conceits
of ourselves than God hath of us; and we _profanely_ make the unspotted
righteousness of Christ serve only as a _covering_ to wrap up our foul
deformities and filthy vices in."[20] This tendency, wherever it
appears, is but legal religion. Men adopt it because it does not
"pinch their sins." It gives them a "sluggish and drowsie Belief, a
lazy Lethargy to hugg their supposed acceptation with God"; it enables
them "to grow big and swell with a mighty bulk with airy fancies and
presumptions of being in favour with Heaven," and it fans up "a
pertinacious Imagination that their Names are enrolled in the Book of
Life, or crossed off in the Debt-Book of Heaven." But it is all "a
meer Conceit or Opinion," for