usage, as well as that new departure and that threatened innovation;—­it is all, at its best, always the penny and never the pound.  Satan busied me about the lesser matters of religion, says James Fraser of Brea, and made me neglect the more substantial points.  He made me tithe to God my mint, and my anise and my cummin, and many other of my herbs, to my all but complete neglect of justice and mercy and faith and love.  Whether there are any of the things that Brea would call mint and anise and cummin that are taking up too much of the time of our controversially-minded men in all our churches, highland and lowland, to-day is a matter for humbling thought.  Labour, my brethren, for yourselves, at any rate, to get yourselves into that sane and sober habit of mind that instantly and instinctively puts all mint and all cummin of all kinds into the second place, and all the weightier matters, both of law and of gospel, into the first place.  I wasted myself on too nice points, laments Brea in his deep, honest, clear-eyed autobiography.  I did not proportion my religious things aright.  The laird of Brea does not say in as many words that he was wise in the penny and foolish in the pound, but that is exactly what he means.

Then, again, the narrowness, the partiality, the sickliness, and the squeamishness of our consciences,—­all that makes us to be too often penny-wise and pound-foolish in our religious life.  A well-instructed, thoroughly wise, and well-balanced conscience is an immense blessing to that man who has purchased such a conscience for himself.  There is an immense and a criminal waste of conscience that goes on among some of our best Christian people through the want of light and space, room, and breadth, and balance in their consciences.  We are all pestered with people every day who are full of all manner of childish scrupulosity and sickly squeamishness in their ill-nourished, ill-exercised consciences.  As long as a man’s conscience is ignorant and weak and sickly it will, it must, spend and waste itself on the pennyworths of religion and’ morals instead of the pounds.  It will occupy and torture itself with points and punctilios, jots and tittles, to the all but total oblivion, and to the all but complete neglect, of the substance and the essence of the Christian mind, the Christian heart, and the Christian character.  The washing of hands, of cups, and of pots, was all the conscience that multitudes had in our Lord’s day; and multitudes in our day scatter and waste their consciences on the same things.  A good man, an otherwise good and admirable man, will absolutely ruin and destroy his conscience by points and scruples and traditions of men as fatally as another will by a life of debauchery.  Some old and decayed ecclesiastical rubric; some absolutely indifferent form in public worship; some small casuistical question about a creed or a catechism; some too nice point of confessional interpretation; the mint and anise and cummin of such matters will