Because talking is so easy to the knowing ones it is not strange that they should water their stock of superstitious prestige with the less knowing ones from their reservoir of words. Then it is the most natural thing for the glib man to set up the thing he can do most easily as the thing essential to salvation, and thus a shibboleth becomes the saving sign. But salvation does not depend on any shibboleth. No man is going to fail of seeing the Most High because he cannot render the precise name by which one race chose to call Him, nor will the sun cease to shine upon him should he seek the highest good in other ways than names. The heart of the universe asks not that we be consistent with the syllogisms of the past, but that we be true to the truth we know ourselves. Every man has some creed back of every deed; but when he puts his creed up in front his deeds soon die. Where words reign they soon reign alone, with nothing but words to serve them. Orthodoxy is so general, because it is so easy and so meaningless. Catch the accent and you are orthodox. But if heaven is to be won by an accent most honest men would rather pay board, somewhere else. No life can be interpreted in language alone. The church is but an obscuration on Christianity when it meets only to analyze the life of its Lord and never to exemplify His deeds. What must heaven think to see a thousand able-bodied men and women gather in a beautiful building to sing hymns of praise to their Diety [Transcriber's note: Deity?] and to listen to arguments about His divinity while, within block of them, there are, in sickness and squalor, distress and sorrow, the ones to whom He sent these people to minister? The doctrines manufactured about Him have hidden the directions given by Him. The trouble is not that we have too much doctrine so much as that we have the wrong kind. The Master's great teaching was, Do the divine things, and the divine truths will take care of themselves. The kingdom will never come until His will is done. Half-tones of heaven will not keep people warm in winter; it is half tons of coal they need. The world will believe in any church that tries to do good. But the church does not believe in itself yet; half the people are strenuously endeavouring to fool themselves into what they call spiritual warmth. What they need is plain Christian perspiration. No man really credits his own religion until he converts it into reality. But the man who prides himself on his heterodoxy is often equally guilty here. He ridicules the old type of piety and thinks to improve on it with new sets of phrases. All these critics have is new arrangements of words. Even the man who rejects all religion satisfies himself with the cant phrase of irreligion. We need most of all to treat religion as sensibly as we do business, to leave the science to those interested while we give ourselves to the practice of its art, the doing of its deeds, the living its life.