And as the mind constitutes high or low, so secular or spiritual. A life spent amid holy things may be intensely secular; a life, the most of which is passed in the thick and throng of the world, may be holy and divine. A minister, for instance, preaching, praying, ever speaking holy words and performing sacred acts, may all the while be doing actions no more holy than those of a printer who prints Bibles, or of the bookseller who sells them; for, in both cases alike, the whole affair may be nothing more than a trade. Nay, the comparison tells worse than the former, for the secular trade is innocent and commendable, but the trade which traffics and tampers with holy things is, beneath all its mock solemnity, “earthly, sensual, devilish.” So, to adduce one other example, the public worship of God is holy work: no man can be living a holy life who neglects it. But the public worship of God may be—and with multitudes who frequent our churches is—degraded into work most worldly, most unholy, most distasteful to the great Object of our homage. He “to whom all hearts be open, all desires known,” discerns how many of you have come hither to-day from the earnest desire to hold communion with the Father of spirits, to open your hearts to him, to unburden yourselves in his loving presence, of the cares and crosses that have been pressing hard upon you through the past week, and by common prayer and praise, and the hearing of his holy Word, to gain fresh incentive and energy for the prosecution of his work in the world; and how many, on the other hand, from no better motive, perhaps, than curiosity or old habit, or regard to decency and respectability, or the mere desire to get rid of yourselves and pass a vacant hour that would hang heavy on your hands. And who can doubt that, where such motives as these prevail, to the piercing, unerring inspection of him whom outwardly we seem to reverence, not the market place, the exchange, the counting-room, is a place more intensely secular—not the most reckless and riotous festivity, a scene of more unhallowed levity, than is presented by the house of prayer?