services of public worship on the Lord's Day; he has also, perhaps, been accustomed to the duty of private prayer, morning and evening. Thus, with him, Acknowledgment is an easy thing: the great difficulty lies in Obedience.
Now, in this condition a great part of the Christian world may be said to be, at the present day. Look into the streets of one of our great cities on a Sunday. Behold the throng of people hastening, at the sound of the Sabbath bell, to the various places of public worship. Acknowledgment of God, and even the formal worship of Him, a belief in His Word, and an attention to it with the ear and the understanding,—these things are not difficult; they are felt by the great majority in Christian communities to be easy enough. Yet is this alone sufficient to save man, or to fit his spirit for heaven? Will these things, merely, enable him to accomplish the great end of his being, and to attain eternal happiness after death? O no! Acknowledgment without Obedience—faith without a good life—is nothing: "though I have all faith," says the apostle Paul, "so that I could remove mountains, and have not charity,—I am nothing."[1] Charity, in its most comprehensive sense, is a state of love to the Lord and to the neighbor, a state of obedience to the Divine commandments, which enjoin such love. Says the apostle James[2], "Be ye doers of the Word, and not hearers only, deceiving your own selves. For if any be a hearer of the Word, and not a doer, he is like unto a man beholding his natural face in a glass; for he beholdeth himself, and straightway forgetteth what manner of man he was." Just such,
