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This text may fairly be taken as a warning against strained piety. It is a common thing for religion to run wild; for goodness to be pushed on wrong lines; for it to be strained, arbitrary, inharmonious, and exaggerated.

I. It sometimes reveals itself in DOCTRINAL FASTIDOUSNESS. Paul writes to Timothy, "Hold fast the form of sound words, which thou hast heard of me, in faith and love which is in Christ Jesus." Hold fast the form, the pattern. The religion of Christ finds expression in the definite, the concrete, the intelligible. But some of us are not content until we have etherealized the great articles of our faith, made our creed vague, intangible, and generally such as it is not possible for a man to utter. De Quincey said of Coleridge, touching the poet's endless refinements and transcendentalisms, "He wants better bread than can be made with wheat." That is rather a common failure in our day, and especially with men of a certain temper. They refine and sublimate their creed until they nearly lose hold of the substantial saving verity.

II. It reveals itself in MORBID INTROSPECTIVENESS. There is, of course, such a thing as a just introspection, that a man looks closely into his own heart and life. It is, indeed, a solemn duty that we should examine ourselves in the sight of God. And yet this duty is often misconceived and pressed to false issues. Men sometimes get morbid about the state of their health. For example, there are the people who are always weighing themselves. Their feelings go up or down with their weight; they are the sport of their gravity. We all feel that such solicitude is a mistake; it is the sign of a morbid, miserable condition. But good people are, not rarely, victims of a similar morbidity: jealous about their religious state, curious about obscure symptoms, always with beating heart putting themselves into the balances of the sanctuary. This habit may prove most hurtful. It makes men morally weak and craven; it destroys their peace; it robs their life of brightness.

III. It reveals itself in AN EXACTING CONSCIENTIOUSNESS. It was said of Grote that "he suffered from a pampered conscience." Many good people do. A fastidious moral sense. It is a legal maxim that "the law concerneth not itself with trifles," and the court is specially impatient of "frivolous and vexatious" charges. But some of us are evermore arraigning ourselves at the bar of conscience about arbitrary, frivolous, vexatious things. It is a great mistake. A true and noble conscience is tender, quick, incisive, imperative; but it is also large, majestic, generous, as is the eternal law of which it is the organ. We cannot pretend to go through life with a conscience akin to those delicate balances which are sensitive to a pencil-mark; if we attempt such painful minuteness, we are likely to be incapable of doing justice to the weightier matters of the law.

IV. This strained piety not rarely reveals itself in THE INORDINATE CULTURE OF SOME SPECIAL VIRTUE. For some reason or other a man conceives a special affection for a particular excellence; it engrosses his attention; it shines in his eye with unique splendour. But this extreme love for any one virtue may easily become a snare. A literary botanist says, "Most of the faults of flowers are only exaggerations of some right tendency." May not the same be said about the faults of some Christians?

V. It reveals itself in STRIVING AFTER IMPRACTICABLE STANDARDS OF CHARACTER. It is a fine characteristic of Christianity that it is so sane, reasonable, practical, humane; it never forgets our nature and situation, our relations and duty. But many think to transcend the goodness of Christianity; they are dreaming of loftier types of character, of sublimer principles, of more illustrious lives than Christianity knows. Fanciful ideals exhaust us, distort us, destroy us. What sweet, bright, fragrant flowers God has made to spring on the earth — cowslips in the meadow, daffodils by the pools, primroses in the woods, myrtles, wall-flowers, lavenders, pinks, roses to bloom in the garden, an infinite wealth of colour and sweetness and virtue! But in these days we are tired of God's flowers, and with a strange wantonness we have taken to dyeing them for ourselves: the world is running after queer blossoms that our fathers knew not — yellow asters, green carnations, blue dahlias, red lilacs. And in the moral world we are guilty of similar freaks. "Learn of Me," says the Master. Yes; let us go back to Him who was without excess or defect. Nothing is more wonderful about our Lord than His perfect naturalness, His absolute balance, His reality, reasonableness, artlessness, completeness. With all His mighty enthusiasm He never oversteps the modesty of nature.

(W. L. Watkinson.)

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KJV: Be not righteous over much; neither make thyself over wise: why shouldest thou destroy thyself?

WEB: Don't be overly righteous, neither make yourself overly wise. Why should you destroy yourself?