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Review and Herald Publishing Association · Takoma Park Station, Washington, D. C. · Jul 27, 1916

No man’s religion can be justly estimated by his public life or service. The best judges are the members of his own household. They know him as he is in life’s practical experiences. Within the confines of his own home, where reserve is laid aside, where he is shut out from the prying gaze of the public, he acts his own natural self. His wife, his children, his servants, have the truest measure of the genuineness of his profession.

If a man is not a Christian in his home, he is not a Christian at all. He may make a profession as high as heaven itself. He may even minister in the sacred things of God. He may labor as zealously as did the apostle Paul and speak with the eloquence of Apollos, but the measure of his Christianity in the courts of heaven is determined not by his profession, but by his heart relationship to God; by his own personal life. There are too many men who, as they go in and out before their fellows, live double lives,—one life for the public and another life in their own home. Too many times the former is a life of pretense, a hollow mockery, a hypocritical profession. The latter constitutes the true measure of what the man really is.

Let us pray God to take pretense and sham out of our lives; to reveal to us by his Holy Spirit what we really are, and to lead us to seek that heart relationship to him which will make us truly representative of his character whether it be before the gaze of man or within the secret consciousness of our own souls. Let us live today as we shall wish we had lived when we appear before the great Judge, and every secret thing is revealed in the light of heaven.