od is the living God, who
brought our forefathers into this land; who has revealed to us the
wealth of it step by step, as we needed it; who is helping and
blessing us now, every day and all the year round--then we shall
begin worshipping other gods.

I do not mean that we shall worship idols, though I do not see why
our children's children should not do so a few hundred years hence
if we teach them to forget the living God. There are too many
Christians at this day who worship saints, and idols of wood and
stone; and so may our descendants do--or do even worse.

But we ourselves shall begin--indeed we are doing it too much
already--worshipping the so-called laws of nature, instead of God
who made the laws, and so honouring the creature above the creator;
or else we shall worship the pomps and vanities of this world, pride
and power, money and pleasure, and say in our hearts, 'These are our
only gods which can help us--these must we obey.' Which if we do,
this land of England will come to ruin and shame, as surely as did
the land of Israel in old time.

If we do not believe in the living God, we shall believe in
something worse than even a dead god.

For in a dead god--a god who does nothing, but lets mankind and the
world go their own way--no man nor nation ever will care to believe.

And now, nay dear friends, remember that a nation is, after all,
only the people in that nation: you, and I, and our neighbours, and
our neighbours' neighbours, and so forth; and that therefore, in as
far as we are wrong, we do our worst to make the British nation
wrong. If we give way to ungodly pride and self-sufficiency, then
we are injuring ourselves; and not only that, but injuring our
neighbours and our children after us, as far as we can. And
therefore our duty is, if we wish well to our nation, not to judge
our neighbour, nor our neighbour's neighbour, but to judge
ourselves.

If we go on trusting in ourselves rather than God; if we keep within
us the hard self-sufficient spirit, and boast to ourselves (though
we may be ashamed to boast to our neighbours), 'My power and the
strength of my hands have got me this and that;' and in fact live
under the notion, which too many have, that we could do very well
without God's help if God would let us alone--then we are heaping up
ruin and shame for ourselves and for our children after us. Ruin
and shame, I say. We are apt to forget how easy and common it is
for God to turn