their own gods.'

Now I venture to take this verse as indicative of a tendency which
belongs to a great many more people than the confused mass of settlers
that were shot down on the hills of Israel by the king of Assyria. It
is really a description of a great deal of what goes by the name of
religion amongst us.

I. The Religion of Fear.

These people would never have thought about God if it had not been for
the lions. When they did think of Him it was only to tremble before
Him. The reason for their trembling was that they did not know the
etiquette of His worship; that they thought of Him as having rights
over them because they had come into His territory, which He would
exact, or punish them for omitting. In a word, their notion of God was
that of a jealous, capricious tyrant, whose ways were inscrutable to
them, in whose territory they found themselves without their will, and
who needed to be propitiated if they would live in peace.

And this is the thought which is most operative in many minds, though
it is veiled in more seemly phrases, and which darkens and injures all
those on whom it lays hold. Need I spend time in showing you how,
point by point, this picture is a picture of many among us? How many
of you think of God when you are ill, and forget Him when you are
well? How many of you pour out a prayer when you are in trouble, and
forget all about Him and it when you are prosperous? How many of you
see God in your calamities and not in your joys? Why do people call
sudden deaths and the like the 'visitation of God'? How many of us are
like Italian sailors who burn candles and shriek out to the Madonna