It is the property of the religious spirit to be the most refining of all influences. It has been termed the social religion, and society is as properly the sphere of all its duties, privileges, and enjoyments as the ecliptic is the course of the earth. No external advantage, no culture of the tastes, no habit of command, no association with the elegant, or even depths of affection can bestow, that delicacy and that grandeur of bearing which belong only to the mind which has experienced the discipline of religious thought and feeling. All else, all superficial aids to etiquette, manner, and refinement as expressed in look and gesture, is but as gilt and cosmetic.
Your personal value depends entirely upon your possession of religion. You are worth to yourself what you are capable of enjoying, you are worth to society the happiness you are capable of imparting. A man whose aims are low, whose motives are selfish, who has in his heart no adoration of God, whose will is not subordinate to the supreme will, who has no hope, no tenable faith in a happy immortality, no strong-armed trust that with his soul it shall be well in all the future, can not be worth very much to himself. Neither can such a man be worth very much to society, because he has not that to bestow which society most needs for its prosperity and happiness.
Christianity teaches the beauty and dignity of common and private life. It makes it valuable, not for the cares from which it frees us, but for the constant duties through which we may train the soul to perfect sympathy with the design of the Creator. It shows that the humblest lot possesses opportunities which require the energies of the most exalted virtues to meet and satisfy. It impresses upon us the solemn truth that life itself, however humble its condition, is always holy; that every moment has its duty and its responsibility, which Christian strength alone, the crown of power, can do and bear. It teaches that the simplest experience may become radiant with a heavenly beauty when hallowed by a spirit of constant love to God and man.
Another of the lessons of Christianity is that of the inestimable worth of common duties as manifesting the greatest principles. It bids us to attain perfection, not striving to do dazzling deeds, but by making our experience divine. It shows us that the Christian hero will ennoble the humblest field of labor, that nothing is mean which can be performed as a duty, but that religion, like the touch of Midas, converts the humblest call of duty into spiritual gold.
God in Nature
The day is Thine, the night also is Thine;
Thou hast prepared the light and the sun;