To combine business with religion, to keep up a spirit of serious piety amid the stir and distraction of a busy and active life,—­this is one of the most difficult parts of a Christian’s trial in this world.  It is comparatively easy to be religious in the church—­to collect our thoughts and compose our feelings, and enter, with an appearance of propriety and decorum, into the offices of religious worship, amidst the quietude of the Sabbath, and within the still and sacred precincts of the house of prayer.  But to be religious in the world—­to be pious and holy and earnest-minded in the counting-room, the manufactory, the market-place, the field, the farm—­to cany our good and solemn thoughts and feelings into the throng and thoroughfare of daily life,—­this is the great difficulty of our Christian calling.  No man not lost to all moral influence can help feeling his worldly passions calmed, and some measure of seriousness stealing over his mind, when engaged in the performance of the more awful and serious rites of religion; but the atmosphere of the domestic circle, the exchange, the street, the city’s throng, amidst coarse work and cankering cares and toils, is a very different atmosphere from that of a communion-table.  Passing from one to the other has often seemed as the sudden transition from a tropical to a polar climate—­from balmy warmth and sunshine to murky mist and freezing cold.  And it appears sometimes as difficult to maintain the strength and steadfastness of religious principle and feeling when we go forth from the church to the world, as it would be to preserve an exotic alive in the open air in winter, or to keep the lamp that burns steadily within doors from being blown out if you take it abroad unsheltered from the wind.

The preacher then speaks of the shifts by which men have evaded the task of being holy, at once in the church and in the world; in ancient times by flying from the world altogether, in modern times by making religion altogether a Sunday thing.  In opposition to either notion the text suggests,—­

That piety is not for Sundays only, but for all days; that spirituality of mind is not appropriate to one set of actions, and an impertinence and intrusion with reference to others; but like the act of breathing, like the circulation of the blood, like the silent growth of the stature, a process that may be going on simultaneously with all our actions—­when we are busiest as when we are idlest; in the church, in the world; in solitude, in society; in our grief and in our gladness; in our toil and in our rest; sleeping, waking; by day, by night; amidst all the engagements and exigencies of life.

The burden of the discourse is to prove that this is so; that religion is compatible with the business of Common Life.  This appears, first, because religion, as a science, sets out doctrines easy to be understood by the humblest intellects; and as an art, sets out duties which may be practised simultaneously with all other work.  It is the art of being and of doing good:  and for this art every profession and calling affords scope and discipline.