“How long halt ye between two opinions?” was the indignant enquiry addressed to the Israelites by the Prophet Elijah: “If the Lord be God, follow Him; if Baal, then follow him.” {67} In every age there have been too many lukewarm in religion, to whom the same enquiry might be addressed, for there has ever been the same disposition to make a compromise between God and Mammon. They are unwilling to forfeit all hope of the fair “inheritance of the saints in light;” they are afraid to encounter the awful terrors of the blackness of darkness for ever; still the world, with its seductive pleasured and engrossing cares, takes a strong hold upon the heart, and is like a withering blight upon the blossoms and fruit of genuine piety. There is no vitality of religious principle, and no consistency of religious conduct. They profess the Gospel, it is true; but they are desirous to accommodate it to their own views and wishes, that it may not interfere with their worldly advantage, not interrupt their present enjoyments. But such a cold and calculating spirit, which appears ever to ask, “How little can I do, and yet get to heaven?” has nothing in it of the Gospel of Christ. Our blessed Lord employs, in the Revelations, terms expressive of the most contemptuous rejection of the works of the Church of Laodicea, because it was “lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot.” {68a} The whole tenor of Scripture inculcates the duty of obedience to “the first and great commandment”—“Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind.” {68b} And they can know little of the glorious and blessed privileges of the children of God by adoption and grace, who do not habitually look up to Him as “a reconciled Father in Christ Jesus our Lord;” who do not cry with humble but firm and confiding faith, “Abba, Father;” and who do not obey, with willing and joyful readiness, the command, “My Son, give me thine heart, and let thine eyes observe my ways.” There is a necessary union between adoption and grace, between grace and holiness, between holiness and love: “as many as are led by the Spirit of God, they are the sons of God:” “Ye are not in the flesh, but in the Spirit, if so be that the Spirit of God dwell in you:” “The fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace.” They, therefore, who do not manifest in their hearts and lives those blessed proofs of the indwelling of the Spirit, renewed minds, sanctified affections, and holy obedience, cannot be said to “walk after the Spirit.” “Now if any man have not the Spirit of Christ, he is none of his:” he is “carnally minded;” and “to be carnally minded is death;” “because the carnal mind is enmity against God, for it is not subject to the law of God, neither indeed can be. So then they that are in the flesh cannot please God.”