His altar. That pervasive, universally diffused reference to
God, in all the details of daily life, is the thing that Christian
men and women need most of all to try to cultivate. 'Pray without
ceasing,' says the Apostle. This exhortation can only be obeyed if
our work is indeed worship, being done by God's help, for God's sake,
in communion with God.

So, dear friends, sacrifice is the keynote--meaning thereby
surrender, control, and stimulus of the corporeal frame, surrender to
God, in regard to the impressions which we allow to be made upon our
senses, to the indulgence which we grant to our appetites, and the
satisfaction which we seek for our needs, and to the activities which
we engage in by means of this wondrous instrument with which God has
trusted us. These are the plain principles involved in the
exhortation of my text. 'He that soweth to the flesh, shall of the
flesh reap corruption.' 'I keep under my body, and bring it into
subjection.' It is a good servant; it is a bad master.

II. Note, secondly, the relation between this priestly service and
other kinds of worship.

I need only say a word about that. Paul is not meaning to depreciate
the sacrificial ritual, from which he drew his emblem. But he is
meaning to assert that the devotion of a life, manifested through
bodily activity, is higher in its nature than the symbolical worship
of any altar and of any sacrifice. And that falls in with prevailing
tendencies in this day, which has laid such a firm hold on the
principle that daily conduct is better than formal worship, that it
has forgotten to ask the question whether the daily conduct is likely
to be satisfactory if the formal worship is altogether neglected. I
believe, as profoundly as any man can, that the true worship is
distinguishable from and higher than the more sensuous forms of the
Catholic or other sacramentarian churches, or the more simple of the
Puritan and Nonconformist, or the altogether formless of the Quaker.
I believe that the best worship is the manifold activities of daily
life laid upon God's altar, so that the division between things
secular and things sacred is to a large extent misleading and
irrelevant. But at the same time I believe that you have very little
chance of getting this diffused and all-pervasive reference of all a
man's doings to God unless there are, all through his life, recurring
with daily regularity, reservoirs of power, stations where he may
rest, kneeling