Men often mistake the nature of religion through wrong teaching received in early years or no teaching received at all, thus giving the well-rooted weeds of error a long start to grow rampant in the human soil. Some people think religion is an isolated activity, like collecting old china, a hobby you can pursue, drop, and pick up again at leisure. Other people imagine it is the conventional badge of good society, giving tone to a life of fashionable respectability, like a carnation slipped into your buttonhole which adds a finishing touch to your evening dress. But they are not over careful, these conventional people, to apply its tenets in the privacy of their homes; religion is never enthroned as a domestic virtue. Lord Melbourne, the early Victorian Prime Minister, was one day coming from church in the country in a mighty fume. Finding a friend on the road, he unloaded: "It’s too bad. I have always been a supporter of the Church, and I have always upheld the clergy. But it is really too bad to have to listen to a sermon like that we had this morning. Why, the preacher actually insisted upon applying religion to a man’s private life!" Their interior life is neither better nor worse for hitching on religion as a supplementary virtue. Such good people would never miss an opportunity of attending a missionary meeting at Caxton Hall or neglect an early morning service at the parish church, but the maid-of-all-work in the kitchen is not benefited by the religious fervour which perfumes her ladyship with the odour of sanctity. Religion is a state of mind giving purpose and direction to the whole round of a man’s activities. Religion is not like a red holly-berry in a tumbler of clear water, a hard, insoluble object, pretty enough seen through the crystal medium, but working no change in the water. Religion resembles a drop of cochineal falling into the water; it colours with rose hue the full contents of the tumbler; it tinges the whole character and conduct of a man; it permeates his thoughts and feelings and actions, changing the colour of his life for good and for ever. Religion works a change--a radical change--that is the point. It is not a question of drapery; it does not merely hang up a decoration here and there to improve appearances, leaving the secret chambers of the heart unclean. It makes a new man in Christ Jesus even out of the coarsest raw material to be found on the human market.