well-being, these be his gods, no matter what his outward profession is.  You can find out what these are for you, if you will ask yourself, and honestly answer, one or two questions.  What is that I want most?  What is it which makes my ideal of happiness?  What is that which I feel that I should be desperate without?  What do I think about most naturally and spontaneously, when the spring is taken off, and my thoughts are allowed to go as they will?  And if the answer to none of these questions is ‘God!’ then I do not know why you should call yourself a worshipper of God.  It is of no avail that we pray in the temple, if we have a dark underground shrine where our true adoration is rendered.

Oh, dear brethren!  I am afraid there are a great many of us nominal Christians, connected with Christian Churches, posing before men as orthodox religionists, who keep this private chapel where we do our devotion to an idol and not to God.  If our real gods could be made visible, what a pantheon they would make!  All the foul forms painted on that cell of this vision would be paralleled in the creeping things, which crawl along the low earth and never soar nor even stand erect, and in the vile, bestial forms of passion to which some of us really bow down.  Honour, wealth, literary or other distinction, the sweet sanctities of human love dishonoured and profaned by being exalted to the place which divine love should hold, ease, family, animal appetites, lust, drink—­these are the gods of some of us.  Bear with my poor words and ask yourselves, not whom do you worship before the eye of men, but who is the God to whom in your inmost heart you bow down?  What do you do in the dark?  That is the question.  Whom do you worship there?  Your other worship is not worship at all.

Do not forget that all such diversion of supreme love and dependence from God alone is like the sin of these men in our text, in that it is sacrilege.  They had taken a chamber in the very Temple, and turned it into a temple of the false gods.  Whom is your heart made to enshrine?  Why! every stone, if I may so say, of the fabric of our being bears marked upon it that it was laid in order to make a dwelling-place for God.  Whom are you meant to worship, by the witness of the very constitution of your nature and make of your spirits?  Is there anybody but One who is worthy to receive the priceless gift of human love absolute and entire?  Is there any but One to whom it is aught but degradation and blasphemy for a man to bow down?  Is there any being but One that can still the tumult of my spirit, and satisfy the immortal yearnings of my soul?  We were made for God, and whensoever we turn the hopes, the desires, the affections, the obedience, and that which is the root of them all, the confidence that ought to fix and fasten upon Him, to other creatures, we are guilty not only of idolatry but of sacrilege.  We commit the sin of which that wild reveller in Babylon was guilty, when, at his great feast, in the very madness