And where this first and best of all wisdom is not, there, in our Lord’s words, there is no deepness of earth, no root, and no fruit.  And any religion that most men have is of this outside, shallow, rootless description.  This was all the religion that poor Pliable ever had.  This poor creature had a certain slight root of something that looked like religion for a short season, but even that slight root was all outside of himself.  His root, what he had of a root, was all in Christian’s companionship and impassioned appeals, and then in those impressive passages of Scripture that Christian read to him.  At your first attention to these things you would think that no possible root could be better planted than in the Bible and in earnest preaching.  But even the Bible, and, much more, the best preaching, is all really outside of a man till true religion once gets its piercing roots down into himself.  We have perhaps all heard of men, and men of no small eminence, who were brought up to believe the teaching of the Bible and the pulpit, but who, when some of their inherited and external ideas about some things connected with the Bible began to be shaken, straightway felt as if all the grounds of their faith were shaken, and all the roots of their faith pulled up.  But where that happened, all that was because such men’s religion was all rooted outside of themselves; in the best things outside of themselves, indeed, but because, in our Lord’s words, their religion was rooted in something outside of themselves and not inside, they were by and by offended, and threw off their faith.  There is another well-known class of men all whose religion is rooted in their church, and in their church not as a member of the body of Christ, but as a social institution set up in this world.  They believe in their church.  They worship their church.  They suffer and make sacrifices for their church.  They are proud of the size and the income of their church; her past contendings and sufferings, and present dangers, all endear their church to their heart.  But if tribulation and persecution arise, that is to say, if anything arises to vex or thwart or disappoint them with their church, they incontinently pull up their roots and their religion with it, and transplant both to any other church that for the time better pleases them, or to no church at all.  Others, again, have all their religiosity rooted in their family life.  Their religion is all made up of domestic sentiment.  They love their earthly home with that supreme satisfaction and that all-absorbing affection that truly religious men entertain for their heavenly home.  And thus it is that when anything happens to disturb or break up their earthly home their rootless religiosity goes with it.  Other men’s religion, again, and all their interest in it, is rooted in their shop; you can make them anything or nothing in religion, according as you do or do not do business in their shop.  Companionship, also, accounts for the fluctuations