Now, the direct tendency of Christian faith and principle is to dwindle into wholesome insignificance the multitudinous voice of men’s judgments.  For, if I understand at all what Christianity means, it means centrally and essentially this, that I am brought into loving personal relation with Jesus Christ, and draw from Him the power of my life, and from Him the law of my life, and from Him the stimulus of my life, and from Him the reward of my life.  If there is a direct communication between me and Him, and if I am deriving from Him the life that He gives, which is ’free from the law of sin and death,’ I shall have little need or desire to heed the judgment that men, who see only the surface, may pass upon me, and upon my doings, and I shall refer myself to Him instead of to them.  Those who can go straight to Christ, whose lives are steeped in Him, who feel that they draw all from Him, and that their actions and character are moulded by His touch and His Spirit, are responsible to no other tribunal.  And the less they think about what men have to say of them the stronger, the nobler, the more Christ-like they will be.

There is no need for any contempt or roughness to blend with such a putting aside of men’s judgments.  The velvet glove may be worn upon the iron hand.  All meekness and lowliness may go with this wholesome independence, and must go with it unless that independence is false and distorted.  ’With me it is a very small thing to be judged of you, or of man’s judgment,’ need not be said in such a tone as to mean ’I do not care a rush what you think about me’; but it must be said in such a tone as to mean ’I care supremely for one approbation, and if I have that I can bear anything besides.’

Let me appeal to you to cultivate more distinctly, as a plain Christian duty, this wholesome independence of men’s judgment.  I suppose there never was a day when it was more needed that men should be themselves, seeing with their own eyes what God may reveal to them and they are capable of receiving, and walking with their own feet on the path that fits them, whatsoever other people may say about it.  For the multiplication of daily literature, the way in which we are all living in glass houses nowadays—­everybody knowing everything about everybody else, and delighting in the gossip which takes the place of literature in so many quarters—­and the tendency of society to a more democratic form give the many-headed monster and its many tongues far more power than is wholesome, in the shaping of the lives and character and conduct of most men.  The evil of democracy is that it levels down all to one plane, and that it tends to turn out millions of people, as like each other as if they had been made in a machine.  And so we need, I believe, even more than our fathers did, to lay to heart this lesson, that the direct result of a deep and strong Christian faith is the production of intensely individual character.  And if there