Article September 11, 1902 Issue

Religious Items

with contributions from Alexander Maclaren

Rev. James H. Ecob, D.D., writes in The Christian Register: —

"Is it not too true of us this day that, when we think of God, He is either in a book, or in a house, or in a remote heaven? Are we not this day sentimental about our God? We draw a line through our life, setting off a small portion which is all clean and still and decorous and idle, and call it religious. That is for God. He is supposed to like that sort of thing. But the other, greater part of our life, the eager, pushing, working, playing part of our life, that is secular. He must not be invited there. . . .

"This division of our life into the religious and secular involves conscience in confusion and sophistry. It has placed the emphasis of conscience upon small, inconsequential matters, — externals, and forms, and times, — often to the exclusion of the weightier matters of truth and justice and goodness. It has become a truism, a commonplace in fiction, a by-word on the street, that your man of punctilious 'piosity' in his holy times and places is just the man who, when he catches you in his secular world, will do you out of your last cent with the address and hardness of a highwayman. I put it to you frankly, do we not all of us on Monday morning step lightly down the street to our business, our shopping, or to our pleasures, with a lurking sense that Richard is himself again: his foot is on his native heath? That meeting with the vast, dim, austere God, in His silent, shaded house, is over. He has retired to his heaven for the next six days, and here I am out in the open, frank, bustling, go-as-you-please, secular life."

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