How numerous these people are! We find them in all ranks of life; there is this skilful use of pretexts in all realms of human activity. +1. Social life,+--_e.g.,_ A man rejects a suitor for his daughter's hand, the suitor being forty-five years of age and the daughter twenty-two, professedly for the excellent reason that too great a disparity in age between man and wife is not desirable but really because the suitor is not sufficiently wealthy. +2. Business,+--_e.g.,_ A man refuses to become security for another, because, he says, he has entered into an undertaking with his partners not to incur any such responsibility, and because it is important that deeds of partnership should be honourably observed; really because he had no wish to oblige the man who asks his aid. +3. Politics.+--Why, this is a form of activity which has to a large extent ceased to be care for the welfare of the city or of the community, and has to the same extent become a game of pretexts, in which broad and great principles are used to cover petty and personal ends. +4. Religion.+--Alas! into this realm also men carry the same spirit and practices. Let us look at some of the prevalent forms of irreligious piety. (1.) There is the man who will not make any confession of Christ, because "religion is a thing between a man's own soul and God." (2.) There is the man who will not join the church, because the members of the church are so inconsistent, and inconsistent Christians are among the greatest of all hindrances to the progress of Christianity. (3.) There is the man who never attends a week-evening service, because "there is no real religion in neglecting one's daily duties, and we are expressly told that we are to be diligent in business." The same man, however, finds it neither impossible nor inconsistent with his duties to attend political meetings and popular concerts. (4.) There is the man who never subscribes to any foreign missionary society, because "religion, like charity, should begin at home, and even in this so-called Christian land there are millions of practical heathen who need to have the Gospel preached to them." How much does this man contribute towards home missions? (5.) There is the man who will not contribute towards any church-building fund, because he does not "believe in bricks and mortar," and because "true religion before God and the Father is--not to build costly sanctuaries--but to help the fatherless and widows in their affliction, and to keep oneself unspotted from the world" (cf. John xii. 4-6). (6.) There is the man who has no hesitation in joining in a Sunday excursion, because "the Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath," and because--the two pleas almost always go together--"it is possible to worship God as truly in the great temple of nature as in any temple built by man." Picture the man as he actually "worships God in the great temple of nature;" and inquire