Or if the truth unworthily spoken
assert its inherent power, that will not justify the hollowness of his
profession, and in vain will he plead at last, "Lord, Lord, have we not
in Thy name cast out devils, and in Thy name done many marvellous acts?"

The only safe rule is to be sure that our conception of God is high and
real and intimate; to be habitually humble and trustful in our attitude
toward Him; and then to speak sincerely and frankly, as then we shall
not fail to do. The words which rise naturally to the lips of men who
think thus cannot fail to do Him honour, for out of the fulness of the
heart the mouth speaketh.

And the prevalent notion that God should be mentioned seldom and with
bated breath is rather an evidence of men's failure habitually to think
of Him aright, than of filial and loving reverence. There is a large and
powerful school of religion in our own day, whose disciples talk much
more of their own emotions and their own souls than St. Paul did, and
much less about God and Christ. Some day the proportions will be
restored. In the great Church of the future men will not morbidly shrink
from confessing their inner life, but neither will it be the centre of
their contemplation and their discourse: they will be filled with the
fulness of God; out of the abundance of their hearts their mouths will
speak; His name shall be continually in their mouth, and yet they shall
not take the name of the Lord their God in vain.

_THE FOURTH COMMANDMENT._

xx. 8-11.

It cannot be denied that the commandment to honour the Sabbath day
occupies a unique place among the ten. It is, at least apparently, a
formal precept embedded in the heart of a moral code, and good men have
thought very differently indeed about its obligation upon the Christian
Church.

The great Continental reformers, Lutheran and Calvinistic alike, who
subscribed the Confession of Augsburg, there affirmed that "Scripture
hath abolished the Sabbath by teaching that all Mosaic ceremonies may be
omitted since the gospel has been revealed" (II. vii. 28). The Scotch
reformers, on the other hand, declared that God "in His Word, by a
positive moral and perpetual commandment, binding all men in all ages,
hath particularly appointed one day in seven for a Sabbath, to be kept
holy unto Him" (_Westminster Confess._, XXI. vii.). They are even so
bold as to declare that this day "from the beginning of the world to the
resurrection of Christ was the las