The garb of religion is the best cloak for power.
With devotion's visage and pious action we do sugar o'er the devil himself.
There is a great difference between Christianity and religion at the south. If a man goes to the communion table, and pays money into the treasury of the church, no matter if it be the price of blood, he is called religious.
That very church which the world likes best is sure to be that which God abhors.
It's all that pretending to be perfect that breeds inauthenticity in the church.
Nothing so tends to mask the face of God as religion; it can be a substitute for God himself.
That raises a terrible question. How is it that people who are quite obviously eaten up with Pride can say they believe in God and appear to themselves very religious? I am afraid it means they are worshiping an imaginary God.
Hypocrisy is oftenest clothed in the garb of religion.
Now, Max, I think we both know your parents aren't missionaries." I opened my eyes wide. "No? Well, for God's sake, don't tell them. They'd be crushed. Thinking they're doing the Lord's work and all.
Many come to bring their clothes to church rather than themselves.
I have noticed that the Christianity of a certain class of respectable people begins when they open their prayer-books at eleven o'clock on Sunday morning, and ends when they shut them up again at one o'clock on Sunday afternoon. Nothing so astonishes and insults Christians of this sort as reminding them of their Christianity on a week-day.
If we are to be ready for Jesus Christ, we have to stop being religious (that is, using religion as a higher kind of culture) and be spiritually real.
You may have orthodox heads, and yet you may have the devil in your hearts.
We don't have a lot of churches in America; we have a lot of really nice brick buildings on finely manicured lawns! Just because someone says they are of the Church or they are Christian, doesn't make it so.
Some hypocrites and seeming mortified men, that held down their heads, were like the little images that they place in the very bowing of the vaults of churches, that look as if they held up the church, but are but puppets.
Nobody can do as much damage to the church of God as the man who is within its walls, but not within its life.
What I thought as a young adult is you act like you have it together whether or not you do because that is what church people do. That is not what God has called us to do.
Hate your next-door neighbor, but don't forget to say grace.
The person who prays more in public than in private reveals that he is less interested in God's approval than in human praise. Not piety but a reputation for piety is his concern.
At its heart, legalism is a desire to appear holy. It is trying to be justified before men and not God.
Really, there is no infidelity, nowadays, so great as that which prays, and keeps the Sabbath, and rebuilds the churches. The sealer of the South Pacific preaches a truer doctrine.
Public displays of puritanical religiosity mask the private perversions of the real Washington behind closed doors.
