This "dead" legalistic form of religion is, however, not merely a thing of antiquity, of some early "dispensation" in the long stretch of years called "B.C." Like superstition, legalistic religion also has "crept into our clothes" and "twined about our secret devotions." The "gospel" can be made, and has often enough been made, "as legal as ever the religion of the Jews was." The gospel becomes legal, in Smith's sense, wherever it is treated "as something onely without us," "as a meer historical story or account," or as a collection of book-facts, or "as _credenda_ propounded for us to believe," or when we attempt to "make Christ's righteousness serve onely as our outward _covering_."[19] "Some of our {310} _Dogmata_," he thinks, "and Notions of Justification puff us up in far higher and goodlier conceits of ourselves than God hath of us; and we _profanely_ make the unspotted righteousness of Christ serve only as a _covering_ to wrap up our foul deformities and filthy vices in."[20] This tendency, wherever it appears, is but legal religion. Men adopt it because it does not "pinch their sins." It gives them a "sluggish and drowsie Belief, a lazy Lethargy to hugg their supposed acceptation with God"; it enables them "to grow big and swell with a mighty bulk with airy fancies and presumptions of being in favour with Heaven," and it fans up "a pertinacious Imagination that their Names are enrolled in the Book of Life, or crossed off in the Debt-Book of Heaven." But it is all "a meer Conceit or Opinion," for such men are "never the better in reality in themselves and God judges all things as they are." "While men continue in their wickedness, they do but vainly dream of a device to tie the hands of Almighty Vengeance."[21] True religion, on the other hand, is absolutely another thing, sundered by the width of the sky from either superstition or legalistic religion. It is a reception and assimilation of the Life of God within the soul of man which is predisposed by its fundamental nature to the influx and formative influence of the Spirit of God, who is the environing Life and inner atmosphere of all human spirits: "_Spiritual Life comes from God's breath within us and from the formation of Christ within the soul_."[22]