that he stepped across to Christian and said, ’What a brave companion we have got!  Surely this man will make a most excellent pilgrim!’ ‘So I once thought too,’ said Christian, ’till I went to live beside him, and have to do with him in the business of daily life.’  Yes, it is near neighbourhood and the business of everyday life that try a talking man.  If you go to a meeting for prayer, and hear some men praying and speaking on religious subjects, you would say to yourself, What a good man that is, and how happy must his wife and children and servants and neighbours be with such an example always before them, and with such an intercessor for them always with God!  But if you were to go home with that so devotional man, and try to do business with him, and were compelled to cross him and go against him, you would find out why Christian smiled so when Faithful was so full of Talkative’s praises.

But of all the religiously-loquacious men of our day, your ministers are the chief.  For your ministers must talk in public, and that often and at great length, whether they are truly religious men at home or no.  It is their calling to talk to you unceasingly about religious matters.  You chose them to be your ministers because they could talk well.  You would not put up with a minister who could not talk well on religious things.  You estimate them by their talk.  You praise and pay them by their talk.  And if they are to live, talk incessantly to you about religion they must, and they do.  If any other man among us is not a religious man, well, then, he can at least hold his tongue.  There is no necessity laid on him to speak in public about things that he does not practise at home.  But we hard-bested ministers must go on speaking continually about the most solemn things.  And if we are not extraordinarily watchful over ourselves, and extraordinarily and increasingly conscientious, if we are not steadily growing in inwardness and insight and depth and real spirituality of mind and life ourselves, we cannot escape,—­our calling in life will not let us escape,—­becoming as sounding brass.  There is an awful sentence in Butler that should be written in letters of fire in every minister’s conscience, to the effect that continually going over religion in talk and making fine pictures of it in the pulpit, creates a professional insensibility to personal religion that is the everlasting ruin of multitudes of eloquent ministers.  That is true.  We ministers all feel that to be true.  Our miserable experience tells us that is only too true of ourselves.  What a flood of demoralising talk has been poured out from the pulpits of this one city to-day!—­demoralising to preachers and to hearers both, because not intended to be put in practice.  How few of those who have talked and heard talk all this day about divine truth and human duty, have made the least beginning or the least resolve to live as they have spoken and heard!  And, yet, all will in words again admit that the soul of religion is the practick part, and that the tongue without the heart and the life is but death and corruption.