ALL of you, my brethren, to some extent profess, and to some extent desire, to be religious. All of you assent to the truth, that religion is the “one thing needful,” and yet many of you, if you knew your hearts, and examined your ways, would be constrained to admit that religion is not the ruling power of your life. You are indeed religious according to the standard of the age, _i.e._, you come to church on Sunday, perhaps occasionally to holy communion, you say your prayers morning and evening, you read the Bible now and then, you do not grossly offend against any one of the ten commandments, you sigh over your frailties and infirmities, you give _something_ to the poor. All this entitles you, in the estimation of others, to be classed among what are called religious people; and suggests to yourselves the comfortable thought, that, at least, you are not worse than other men; that, in fact, you are much better than many. Still, if you are careful readers of your Bible, if you are observant of the world within and around you, if you are given to self-searching, you must often feel that your religion is but a sorry counterfeit of what GOD has taught and saints have reflected; that you are scarcely half in earnest about it; that you experience very little advantage from it; that you render very empty homage to it. For instance, you read the Sermon on the Mount, or the reiteration of many parts of it here and there, in the epistles; you put together the several characteristics of true religion there displayed; and then, turning an eye upon yourselves, looking back upon the path you have trodden, surveying the ground upon which you now stand, testing your practice, scanning your motives, asking yourselves, “By what am I mainly influenced? whither tend my chief desires? what are my feelings?” “Alas!” you exclaim, “where, in all these, are the influences and operations of the religion taught by Christ and His apostles?”