works,— between his teaching and his doing, — ^between his preaching and his practice. One thing at all events is very certain. No lessons produce such effects on men as those which the teacher illustrates by his own daily life. Happy is he who can say with Paul, "Those things which ye have heard and seen in me, do." (Philip, iv. 9.)
We learn, secondly, from our Lord's words, how much more easy it is to admire dead saints than living ones. He says to the lawyers, "Ye build the sepulchres of the prophets, and your fathers killed them." They professed to honour the memory of the prophets, while they lived in the very same ways which the prophets had con- demned ! They openly neglected their advice and teach- ing, and yet they pretended to respect their graves !
The practice which is here exposed has never been without followers in spirit, if not in the letter. Thou- sands of wicked men in every age of the church have tried to deceive themselves and others by loud professions of admiration for the saints of God after their decease. By so doing they have endeavoured to ease their own consciences, and blind the eyes of the world. They have sought to raise in the minds of others the thought, "If these men love the memories of the good so dearly, they must surely be of one heart with them." They have forgotten that even a child can see that "dead men tell no tales," and that to admire men when they can neither reprove us by their lips, nor put us to shame by their lives, is a very cheap admiration indeed.
Would we know what a man's religious character really is P Let us inquire what he thinks of true Chris- tians while they are yet alive. — Does he love them, and