THE SPIRITUAL AND MATERIAL
Your religious life is absolutely worthless unless you can make the spiritual side show itself in your daily life. Dear old George Herbert long ago wrote, "Let thy mind's sweetness have its operation upon body, clothes, and habitation." Now, are you doing this? Or are you simply using your religion as a course of æsthetic pleasure for yourself? Are you living a negative life—that is, doing what you think correct, as far as the outward observance of your religion demands, and, as you put it, "doing no harm to anybody"? That last condition does not exist. When you don't do harm to people you do them good, and so you must be influencing them in some ways. To your brother, your sister, your father or mother, you are showing something of your religious life. Are you giving them the impression that religion is good to think of and talk about, but not to live by?—that it makes very little difference whether one has a belief or not when it comes to a question of every-day life? If this is so, do you realize that you are announcing that while it is interesting, it is neither worth living by, nor dying for? Harsh? No, I am not that. I am only trying to show you of how little use is religion unless you make it a
