needful to-day as ever it was to say to men:
'Forms are not worship. Rites may crush the spirit. Men may yield to
the sensuous impressions which they produce, and be lapped in an
atmosphere of aesthetic emotion, without any real devotion.'

Such externals are only worth anything if they make us grasp more
firmly with our understandings and feel more profoundly with our
hearts, the great truths of the Gospel. If they do that, they help;
if they are not doing that, they hinder, and are to be fought
against. And so we have again to proclaim to-day, as Paul did,
'Circumcision is nothing,' 'but the keeping of the commandments of
God.'

Then notice with what remarkable fairness and boldness and breadth
the Apostle here adds that other clause: 'and uncircumcision is
nothing.' It is a very hard thing for a man whose life has been spent
in fighting against an error, not to exaggerate the value of his
protest. It is a very hard thing for a man who has been delivered
from the dependence upon forms, not to fancy that his formlessness is
what the other people think that their forms are. The Puritan who
does not believe that a man can be a good man because he is a
Ritualist or a Roman Catholic, is committing the very same error as
the Ritualist or the Roman Catholic who does not believe that the
Puritan can be a Christian unless he has been 'christened.' The two
people are exactly the same, only the one has hold of the stick at
one end, and the other at the other. There may be as much idolatry in
superstitious reliance upon the bare worship as in the advocacy of
the ornate; and many a Nonconformist who fancies that he has 'never
bowed the knee to Baal' is as true an idol-worshipper in his
superstitious abhorrence of the ritualism that he sees in other
communities, as are the men who trust in it the most.

It is a large attainment in Christian character to be able to say
with Paul, 'Circumcision is nothing, and my own favourite point of
uncircumcision is nothing either. Neither the one side nor the other
touches the essentials.'

II. Now let us look at the threefold variety of the designation of
these essentials here.

In our first text from the Epistle to the Corinthians we read,
'Circumcision is nothing, and uncircumcision is nothing, but the
keeping of the commandments of God.' If we finished the sentence it
would be, 'but the keeping of the commandments of God is everything.'

And by that 'keeping the commandments,' of co