402 CONDITIONS AND REWARDS. affectation of disinterestedness and 're- fining on the promises, we shall come to do away all moral obligation, we shall attenuate the substantial realities of Christianity into a meagre theory, reduce the fruitful principle of practical religion to a dry and unproductive speculation, a barren thing, to which nothing that is perceptible, palpable, tangible, and prac- tical, is necessarily appended. Christian- ity is substance as well as essence. On the other hand, it is but too noto- rious, that the terms here humbly at- tempted to be vindicated and restored to their true signification, are too fre- quently made the sum, the entire whole of religion, till the spirituality of the Gospel, and the great peculiarities of the religion of Jesus, are smothered in the heap of frigid human ethics. It is by the promises annexed to these conditions, that the Christian is gra- dually brought to consider prayer, not merely as a duty, but to value it as a privilege ; and the more earnestly he
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