of little importance. Much which we feel to be wrong it regards as
good. Our jewels are its tinsel, and its jewels are our tinsel. We
and it stand in diametrical opposition of thought about God, about
self, about duty, about life, about death, about the future; and that
opposition goes right down to the bottom of things. However it may be
covered over, there is a gulf, as in some of those American canons:
the towering cliffs may be very near--only a yard or two seems to
separate them; but they go down for thousands and thousands of feet,
and never are any nearer each other, and between them at the bottom a
black, sullen river flows. 'If ye were of the world, the world would
love its own.' If it loves you, it is because ye are of it.

II. And so note, secondly, how this hostility is masked and modified.

There are a great many other bonds that unite men together besides
the bonds of religious life or their absence. There are the domestic
ties, there are the associations of commerce and neighbourhood, there
are surface identities of opinion about many important things. The
greater portion of our lives moves on this surface, whore all men are
alike. 'If you tickle us, do we not laugh; if you wound us, do we not
bleed?' We have all the same affections and needs, pursue the same
avocations, do the same sort of things, and a large portion of every
one's life is under the dominion of habit and custom, and determined
by external circumstances. So there is a film of roofing thrown over
the gulf. You can make up a crack in a wall with plaster after a
fashion, and it will hide the solution of continuity that lies
beneath. But let bad weather come, and soon the bricks gape apart as
before. And so, as soon as we get down below the surface of things
and grapple with the real, deep-lying, and formative principles of a
life, we come to antagonism, just as they used to come to it long