This looked like contrition and self-judgment; but it was hollow and false. It is a very easy thing to _say_, "We have sinned." Saul said it in his day; but he said it without heart, without any genuine sense of what he was saying. We may easily gather the force and value of the words "I have sinned" from the fact that they were immediately followed by "_Honor me_ now, I pray thee, before the elders of my people." What a strange contradiction!--"I have sinned," yet "Honor me." If he had really felt his sin, how different his language would have been! how different his spirit, style, and deportment! but it was all a solemn mockery. Only conceive a man full of himself, making use of a form of words, without one atom of true heart-feeling; and then, in order to get honor for himself, going through the empty formality of worshiping God. What a picture! Can any thing be more sorrowful? How terribly offensive to Him who desires truth in the inward parts, and who seeks those to worship Him who worship Him in spirit and in truth! The feeblest breathings of a broken and contrite heart are precious to God; but, oh, how offensive to Him are the hollow formalities of a mere religiousness, the object of which is to exalt man in his own eyes and in the eyes of his fellows! How perfectly worthless is the mere lip-confession of sin where the heart does not feel it! As a recent writer has well remarked, "it is an easy thing to say, 'We have sinned,' but how often we have to learn that it is not the quick, abrupt confession of sin which affords evidence that sin is felt! It is rather a proof of hardness of heart. The conscience feels that a certain act of confessing the sin is necessary, but perhaps there is hardly any thing which more hardens the heart than the habit of confessing sin without feeling it. This, I believe, is one of the great snares of christendom from of old and now, that is, the stereotyped acknowledgment of sin--the mere habit of hurrying through a formula of confession to God. I dare say we have almost all done so, without referring to any particular mode; for, alas! there is formality enough; and without having written forms, the heart may frame forms of its own, as we may have observed, if not known it, in our own experience, without finding fault with other people."[4] [4] "Lectures Introductory to the Pentateuch," by W. Kelly.