exalt these unimportant externals
into the place of faith.

The whole purpose of the Gospel may be described to be our deliverance
from the dominion of sense, and the transference of the centre of our
life to the unseen world. This end is no doubt partly accomplished by
the help of sense. So long as men have bodily organisations, there will
be need for outward helps. Men's indolence, and men's sense-ridden
natures, will take symbols for royalties, bank-notes for wealth. The
eye will be tempted to stay on the rich colours of the glowing glass,
instead of passing through them to heaven's light beyond. To make the
senses a ladder for the soul to climb to heaven by, will be perilously
likely to end in the soul going down the ladder instead of up. Forms are
sure to encroach, to overlay the truth that lies at their root, to
become dimly intelligible, or quite unmeaning, and to constitute at last
the end instead of the means. Is it not then wise to minimise these
potent and dangerous allies? Is it not needful to use them with the
remembrance that a minute quantity may strengthen, but an overdose will
kill--ay, and that the minute quantity may kill too? Christ instituted
two outward rites. There could not have been fewer if there was to be an
outward community at all, and they could not have been simpler; but look
at the portentous outgrowth of superstition, and the unnumbered evils,
religious, moral, social, and even political, which have come from the
invincible tendency of human nature to corrupt forms, even when the
forms are the sweet and simple ones of Christ's own appointment. What a
lesson the history of the Lord's Supper, and its gradual change from the
domestic memorial of the dying love of our Lord to the 'tremendous
sacrifice,' reads us as to the dangerous ally which spiritual
religion--and there is no other religion than spiritual--enlists when it
seeks the help of external rites!

But remember that this danger of converting religion into outward
actions has its root in us all, and is not annihilated by our rejection
of an elaborate ceremonial. There is much significance in the double
negation of my text, 'Neither circumcision nor uncircumcision.' If the
Judaisers were tempted to insist on the former, as indispensable, their
antagonists were as much tempted to insist on the latter. The one were
saying, 'A man cannot be a Christian unless he be circumcised.' The
other would be in danger of replying, 'He cannot be