our eyes on the object.  And we had come to our manhood before we knew how to seek for the visual image that lies at the root of all our words.  And thus the ill-taught schoolboy became in us the father of the confirmed formalist.  The mischief of this neglect still spreads through the whole of our life, but it is absolutely disastrous in our religious life.  Look at the religious formalist at family worship with his household gathered round him all in his own image.  He would not on any account let his family break up any night without the habitual duty.  He has a severe method in his religious duties that nothing is ever allowed to disarrange or in any way to interfere with.  As the hour strikes, the big Bible is brought out.  He opens where he left off last night, he reads the regulation chapter, he leads the singing in the regulation psalm, and then, as from a book, he repeats his regulation prayer.  But he never says a word to show that he either sees or feels what he reads, and his household break up without an idea in their heads or an affection in their hearts.  He comes to church and goes through public worship in the same wooden way, and he sits through the Lord’s Table in the same formal and ceremonious manner.  He has eyes of glass and hands of wood, and a heart without either blood or motion in it.  His mind and his heart were destroyed in his youth, and all his religion is a religion of rites and ceremonies without sense or substance.  ‘Because I knew no better,’ says Bunyan, ’I fell in very eagerly with the religion of the times:  to wit, to go to church twice a day, and that, too, with the foremost.  And there should I sing and say as others did.  Withal, I was so overrun with the spirit of superstition that I adored, and that with great devotion, even all things, both the high place, priest, clerk, vestment, service, and what else belonged to the church:  counting all things holy that were therein contained.  But all this time I was not sensible of the danger and evil of sin.  I was kept from considering that sin would damn me, what religion soever I followed, unless I was found in Christ.  Nay, I never thought of Christ, nor whether there was one or no.’

A formalist is not yet a hypocrite exactly, but he is ready now and well on the way at any moment to become a hypocrite.  As soon now as some temptation shall come to him to make appear another and a better man than he really is:  when in some way it becomes his advantage to seem to other people to be a spiritual man:  when he thinks he sees his way to some profit or praise by saying things and doing things that are not true and natural to him,—­then he will pass on from being a bare and simple formalist, and will henceforth become a hypocrite.  He has never had any real possession or experience of spiritual things amid all his formal observances of religious duties, and he has little or no difficulty, therefore, in adding another formality or two to his former life