Wesley Corpus

father than an humble adoration of the Most High, and must be expected to draw down his heaviest vengeance rather than his gracious blessing upon us. In fine, any instances of piety whose best merit consists in decency of performance may be the piety of scribes and pharisees, but not of Christians. Another instance wherein the righteousness of Christians is to exceed that of the scribes and pharisees is in the extensiveness of it. Any Christian who is pious upon principle, and whose virtue proceeds from purity of in tention, will immediately perceive the neces sity of a uniform conduct, and how incum bent it is for a Christian not to act inconsist ently, so that one part of his life may not contradict the other. The scribes and phari sees made long prayers, but at the same time they devoured widows' houses. They paid tithe of mint, anise, and cummin, and in this they did well ; but then they neglected the weightier matters of the law -judgment, justice, and truth. In short, they were reli gious as far as ceremonies and modes of wor ship were concerned, but neither pious nor honest in their common life. And here it is that the Christian is required to exceed them. He is commanded to perform every action with the same spirit as he performs his devotions ; the glory of God is the end that he proposes in his prayers, and the same sacred purpose is to be the rule of every part of his life. We have an apostolical precept to regu late the most ordinary as well as necessary actions, " Whether ye eat or drink, or what ever ye do, do all to the glory of God ;" and he must be a very loose casuist who can find an exception to this heavenly rule, or point out any actions of a Christian which are not to be tried by it: and whoever thinks that he need only have a view to this sublime end while he is in the immediate act of worshipping, may perhaps lay claim to the righteousness (as they do to the purity) of the scribes and pharisees, but not to that of the disciples of Christ. The religion which the blessed Jesus insti tuted was designed to shine forth in the lives