They degenerate
either into formalism and hypocrisy, or into spiritual self-
indulgence. "Herein is My Father glorified, that ye bear much fruit."
"By their fruits ye shall know them." And the "fruits" of Christian
living are to be discovered, not in the hours spent in devotion, but
in the manifestation amid the activities of the market-place of that
temper of righteousness and peace and joy in the Holy Ghost, and that
spirit of unselfish service, which should be their normal product.
What is needed is a wider conception of Churchmanship and a truer
doctrine of vocation. All honest work in which a Christian can
lawfully engage should be regarded as an expression of his
Churchmanship--as truly work done for the Church of GOD in obedience
to a vocation from on high as is the work of a priest or a teacher of
religion. It is at least partly because the majority of laymen do not
so interpret their work in life that in so many cases they are
discovered to be in effect living for the sake of their leisure and
regarding their daily work as uninteresting drudgery, with the result
that life as a whole comes to be for them dreary and profitless and
stale.
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