Church and chapel-goers are alike exposed to the danger of erecting
the forms of worship to a place in which they cannot be put without
marring the spirit of worship. Whether our worship be more or less
symbolic, whether we have a more or less elaborate ritual, whether we
think more or less of sacraments, whether we put hearing a sermon as
more or less prominent, or even if we follow the formless forms of the
Friends, we are all tempted to substitute our forms for the spirit
which alone is worship.

III. The Religion of Compromise or Worldliness.

They had God and they had gods. They liked the latter best. They gave
God formal worship, but they gave the others more active service.

Such a kind of religion is a type of much that we see around us; the
attempt to be Christians and worldlings, the indecision under which
many men labour all their lives, being drawn one way by their
consciences, another by their inclinations.

You cannot unite the two. God requires all. He fills the heart, and
claims supreme control over all the nature. There cannot be two
supreme in the soul. It cannot be God and self. It must be God or
self. You may look now one way and now another, but the way the heart
goes is the thing. Mr. Facing-both-ways does not really face both
ways. He only turns quickly round from one to the other.

Such divided religion is impossible in the nature of God--of the
soul--of religion.