religion, you see him intensely interested in, and day and night occupied with, the outside things of religion, till nothing short of a miracle will open his eyes.  See him in the ministry, for instance, sweating at his sermons and in his visiting, till you would almost think that he is the minister of whom Paul prophesied, who should spend and be spent for the salvation of men’s souls.  But all the time, such is the hypocrisy that haunts the ministerial calling, he is really and at bottom animated with ambition for the praise of men only, and for the increase of his congregation.  See him, again, now assailing or now defending a church’s secular privileges, and he knowing no more, all the time, what a church has been set up for on earth than the man in the moon.  What a penalty his defence is and his support to a church of Christ, and what an incubus his membership must be!  Or, see him, again, making long speeches and many prayers for the extension of the kingdom of Christ, and all the time spending ten times more on wine or whisky or tobacco, or on books or pictures or foreign travel, than he gives to the cause of home or foreign missions.  And so on, all through our hypocritical and self-blinded life.  Through such stages, and to such a finish, does the formalist pass from his thoughtless and neglected youth to his hardened, blinded, self-seeking life, spent in the ostensible service of the church of Christ.  If the light that is in such men be darkness, how great is that darkness!  We may all well shudder as we hear our Lord saying to ministers and members and church defenders and church supporters, like ourselves:  ’Now ye say, We see; therefore your sin remaineth.’

Now, the first step to the cure of all such hypocrisy, and to the salvation of our souls, is to know that we are hypocrites, and to know also what that is in which we are most hypocritical.  Well, there are two absolutely infallible tests of a true hypocrite,—­tests warranted to unmask, expose, and condemn the most finished, refined, and even evangelical hypocrite in this house to-night, or in all the world.  By far and away the best and swiftest is prayer.  True prayer, that is.  For here again our inexpugnable hypocrisy comes in and leads us down to perdition even in our prayers.  There is nothing our Lord more bitterly and more contemptuously assails the Pharisees for than just the length, the loudness, the number, and the publicity of their prayers.  The truth is, public prayer, for the most part, is no true prayer at all.  It is at best an open homage paid to secret prayer.  We make such shipwrecks of devotion in public prayer, that if we have a shred of true religion about us, we are glad to get home and to shut our door.  We preach in our public prayers.  We make speeches on public men and on public events in our public prayers.  We see the reporters all the time in our public prayers.  We do everything but pray in our public prayers.  And to get away alone,—­what an escape