Then notice with what remarkable fairness and boldness and breadth the Apostle here adds that other clause:  ’and uncircumcision is nothing.’  It is a very hard thing for a man whose life has been spent in fighting against an error, not to exaggerate the value of his protest.  It is a very hard thing for a man who has been delivered from the dependence upon forms, not to fancy that his formlessness is what the other people think that their forms are.  The Puritan who does not believe that a man can be a good man because he is a Ritualist or a Roman Catholic, is committing the very same error as the Ritualist or the Roman Catholic who does not believe that the Puritan can be a Christian unless he has been ‘christened.’  The two people are exactly the same, only the one has hold of the stick at one end, and the other at the other.  There may be as much idolatry in superstitious reliance upon the bare worship as in the advocacy of the ornate; and many a Nonconformist who fancies that he has ’never bowed the knee to Baal’ is as true an idol-worshipper in his superstitious abhorrence of the ritualism that he sees in other communities, as are the men who trust in it the most.

It is a large attainment in Christian character to be able to say with Paul, ’Circumcision is nothing, and my own favourite point of uncircumcision is nothing either.  Neither the one side nor the other touches the essentials.’

II.  Now let us look at the threefold variety of the designation of these essentials here.

In our first text from the Epistle to the Corinthians we read, ’Circumcision is nothing, and uncircumcision is nothing, but the keeping of the commandments of God.’  If we finished the sentence it would be, ‘but the keeping of the commandments of God is everything.’

And by that ‘keeping the commandments,’ of course, the Apostle does not mean merely external obedience.  He means something far deeper than that, which I put into this plain word, that the one essential of a Christian life is the conformity of the will with God’s—­not the external obedience merely, but the entire surrender and the submission of my will to the will of my Father in Heaven.  That is the all-important thing; that is what God wants; that is the end of all rites and ceremonies; that is the end of all revelation and of all utterances of the divine heart.  The Bible, Christ’s mission, His passion and death, the gift of His Divine Spirit, and every part of the divine dealings in providence, all converge upon this one aim and goal.  For this purpose the Father worketh hitherto, and Christ works, that man’s will may yield and bow itself wholly and happily and lovingly to the great infinite will of the Father in heaven.