The recognition which we accord to real worth, to high, and noble, and strong manhood and womanhood, with the scorn we have for the canting weakling, is but part of our discrimination between a living, deep religion expressed in conduct and a mask or pretense adopted for profit or convenience.
Still there are many good people, sincere in their religious professions, who practically are no good at all when they come to some strain on conscience, or some real test in life. Is it not because in their minds religion never has been related to conduct? They are grounded on the eschatology of Christianity but not on its ethics.
It is possible to go through a full course of religious instruction in the regularly appointed agencies of many churches and to come out with clear-cut conceptions of heaven and angels, but with the most misty and even misleading conceptions of right relations among men, of honesty, and justice, and truth.
The schools teach us about the stars and the earth, about men dead and beasts living; the church teaches us of saints and seraphs, and about an ancient literature; but who shall teach us and our children the art of living, the laws of human duties? Of what value is all our knowledge unless we get the wisdom of right living?
No man is saved until he is made strong, sane, useful, and reliable. The most irreligious thing in this world is a religion that makes people think that an imputed or technical salvation absolves them from the necessity of practical salvation, the working out of the best and noblest in their lives. Religion without morality is a mockery.
Real religion is the secret and source of the highest, strongest, cleanest character. It furnishes the life with motives mightier than any considerations of advantage or profit; it ties the soul up to eternal and spiritual verities; it refreshes the heart as with living waters when life seems all desert; it sets the heart in step with the Infinite One who marches on through the ages.
Perhaps the chief damage done by the confusion of tongues at Babel was that it tended to a multiplicity of words. Whether it was so before that time or not, it is certain that ever since there has been a constant likelihood of religion and every other good thing being drowned in floods of rhetoric. Where there are ten ways of saying a thing it is so much easier to use them all than to do the thing in the one way in which it may be done. Words become the chief enemies of works. A volume containing all the words of the great Teacher would look mighty insignificant beside the ponderous tomes of the modern exponents of His teachings. That is because the minister has become the preacher.