The second thing, that demands our attention, is the uselessness of mere lip-service in the worship of God. Our Lord enforces this lesson by a quotation from the Old Testament : " Well hath Esaias prophesied of you hypo- crites, This people honoreth me with their lips, but their heart is far from me."
The heart is the part of man which God chiefly notices in religion. The bowed head, and the bended knee — the grave face and the rigid posture — the regular re- sponse, and the formal amen — all these together do not make up a spiritual worshipper. The eyes of God look further and deeper. He requires the worship of the heart. " My son," he says to every one of us, " Give me thy heart."
Let us remember this in the public congregation. It must not content us to take our bodies to church, if we leave our hearts at home. The eye of man may detect no flaw in our service. Our minister may look at us with approbation. Our neighbors may think us patterns of
never wanted imitators and successors. Zeal about washing pots, and cups, and tables, may seem almost ludicrous, and worthy of none but children ; but we need not look far to find an exact parallel near home. What can we say to the gravity and seriousness with which men argue on behalf of chasubles, albs, tunicles, piscinas, sedilia, credence-tables, rood-screens, and the like, in the present day ? What can we say to the exaggerated attention paid by many to ceremonies, ornaments, gestures, and postures, in the worship of God, about which it is enough to say that Scripture is totally silent ? What is it all but Pharisaism over again ? What is it but a melancholy repetition of disproportioned zeal about men's traditional usages ? What single argument can be used in defence of these things that the Pharisees might not have used with equal force ? Eighteen hundred years have passed away, and yet the generation that made so much ado about washing pots, cups, and tables, is still amongst us. The succession of the Pharisees has never ceased.