lege as well as idolatry. Both things are true about
us.

A man's true worship is not the worship which he performs in the public
temple, but that which he offers down in that little private chapel,
where nobody goes but himself. Worship is the attribution of supreme
excellence to, and the entire dependence of the heart upon, a certain
person. And the people or the things to which a man attributes the
highest excellence, and on which he hangs his happiness and well-being,
these be his gods, no matter what his outward profession is. You can
find out what these are for you, if you will ask yourself, and honestly
answer, one or two questions. What is that I want most? What is it which
makes my ideal of happiness? What is that which I feel that I should be
desperate without? What do I think about most naturally and
spontaneously, when the spring is taken off, and my thoughts are allowed
to go as they will? And if the answer to none of these questions is
'God!' then I do not know why you should call yourself a worshipper of
God. It is of no avail that we pray in the temple, if we have a dark
underground shrine where our true adoration is rendered.

Oh, dear brethren! I am afraid there are a great many of us nominal
Christians, connected with Christian Churches, posing before men as
orthodox religionists, who keep this private chapel where we do our
devotion to an idol and not to God. If our real gods could be made
visible, what a pantheon they would make! All the foul forms painted on
that cell of this vision would be paralleled in the creeping things,
which crawl along the low earth and never soar nor even stand erect, and
in the vile, bestial forms of passion to which some of us really bow
down. Honour, wealth, literary or other distinction, the sweet
sanctities of human love dishonoured and profaned by being exalted to
the place which divine love should hold, ease, family, animal appetites,
lust, drink--these are the gods of some of us. Bear with my poor words
and ask yourselves, not whom do you worship before the eye of men, but
who is the God to whom in your inmost heart you bow down? What do you do
in the dark? That is the question. Whom do you worship there? Your other
worship is not worship at all.

Do not forget that all such diversion of supreme love and dependence
from God alone is like the sin of these men in our text, in that it is
sacrilege. They had taken a chamber in the very Temple, and turned it
into a t