Another reason I have for not dwelling too much on these affectations; and it is this.  Because a man may be a play-actor and a self-deceiver in religion, without any of these tricks at all, and without much of the vanity and pride which cause them.  For recollect that a man may act for his own amusement, as well as for other people’s.  Children do so perpetually, and especially when no one is by to listen to them.  They delight in playing at being this person and that, and in living for a while in a day-dream.  Oh let us take care that we do not do the same in our religion!  It is but too easy to do so.  Too easy; and too common.  For is it not play-acting, like any child, to come to this church, and here to feel repentance, feel forgiveness, feel gratitude, feel reverence; and then to go out of church and awake as from a dream, and become our natural selves for the rest of the week, till Sunday comes round again; comforting ourselves meanwhile with the fancy that we had been very religious last Sunday, and intended to be very religious next Sunday likewise?

Would there not be hypocrisy and play-acting in that, my friends?

Now, my dear friends, if we give way to this sort of hypocrisy, we shall get, as too many do, into the habit of living two lives at once, without knowing it.  Outside us will be our religious life of praying, and reading, and talking of good things, and doing good work (as, thank God, many do whose hearts are not altogether right with God, or their eyes single in his sight) good work, which I trust God will not forget in the last day, in spite of all our inconsistencies.  Outside us, I say, will be our religious life:  and inside us our own actual life, our own natural character, too often very little changed or improved at all.  So by continually playing at religion, we shall deceive ourselves.  We shall make an entirely wrong estimate of the state of our souls.  We shall fancy that this outward religion of ours is the state of our soul.  And then, if any one tells us that we are play-acting, and hypocrites, we shall be as astonished and indignant as the Pharisees were of old.  We shall make the same mistake as a man would, who because he always wore clothes, should fancy at last that his clothes were himself, part of his own body.  So, I say, many deceive themselves, and are more or less hypocrites to themselves.  They do not, in general, deceive others; they are not, on the whole, hypocrites to their neighbours.  For their neighbours, after a time, see what they cannot see themselves, that they are play-acting; that they are two different people without knowing it:  that their religion is a thing apart from their real character.  A hundred signs shew that.  How many there are, for instance, who are, or seem tolerably earnest about religion, and doing good, as long as they are actually in church, or actually talking about religion.  But all the rest of their time, what are they doing?  What are they thinking of?  Mere frivolity and empty amusement.  Idle butterflies, pretending to be industrious bees once in the week.