God as essential to their happiness. If they should discover that God stood in the way of their future enjoyment, they would like him no better than any other enemy.
Such minds mistake lust for love, and in seeking their own happiness call it seeking God; and in rejoicing in their anticipations, call it rejoicing in God. The man that seeks religion for the sake of securing to himself salvation and endless delight, is just as lustful and selfish as he who seeks gratification in any other way. Man may go a whoring after strange gods as well as after strange women.
Those who appeal to men to get religion in order that they may escape misery and secure happiness, appeal to their lusts, and so far as they influence them by their appeals to their hopes and fears, they stimulate them to lust. The individual who seeks religion for the purpose of saving his soul, is exercising the very impulse which most of all tends to defeat his salvation. Hence said Jesus upon this very point, "Whosoever seeketh to save his life shall lose it," etc. The very impulse is as selfish and undivine as possible. It is for this very reason that the influence of the popular religions of the day is not redemptive in its character. To say to the world that when all should be converted to the religion of these fashionable churches, the millennium would come, would provoke in the highest degree their sense of the ludricrous. Their lustful seeking after self-gratification is so apparent and gross, that they can not even deceive themselves.
It will not be considered a false declaration when I say, that there is no possible resemblance of character
