109SermonsbyJCRyle
sceptics, and would be justly offended if you called them infidels or agnostics. Yet, if truth must be spoken, except going to church or chapel on Sundays, they give no evidence of true Christianity. If you mark their daily life, they seem neither to think, nor feel, nor care for their souls, or God, or eternity.
Now, I warn any readers of this paper who are in this state, and I say it with pain, that you are the true cause of a vast proportion of infidelity! I remember a careless sceptic saying—"Do you think I am going to believe your Christianity when I see so many of your churchgoers behaving as they do? Do you mean to tell me that they think their creed is true, and that they really believe in a resurrection and a judgment to come? It will be time enough for me to believe—when I see your people really believing. At present your Christianity seems a great sham and a mere form." Alas! such talk as this is only too much justified by facts. Nothing, nothing, I am convinced, does so much to help the progress of modern infidelity—as the utter absence of reality and earnestness among professing Christians. Men and women who crowd churches on Sundays—and then live worldly selfish lives all the week—are the best and most efficient allies of the devil. "If you believed what you repeat under the pulpit," the sceptic says, "you would never live as you live at home." Oh! that people would think of the mischief done by inconsistency. "Awake, you who sleep—and arise from the dead." It is bad enough to ruin your own soul. But do not add to your sin by ruining others.
3. In the third place, I have a word for those sincere but weak-minded Christians who are surprised and frightened at the unbelief of these latter days, and live in a constant state of panic and alarm. What shall I say to you? Listen, and I will tell you.
I ask you, then, to look to your Bibles, and lay aside your fears. There is nothing in unbelief which ought to surprise you. Search the Scriptures, and you will find that the unbelief of the twentieth century is only an old enemy in a new dress—an old disease in a