are plenty of angles in it, perhaps so much the better.  We are apt to be rounded by being rubbed against each other, like the stones on the beach, till there is not a sharp corner or a point that can prick anywhere.  So society becomes utterly monotonous, and is insipid and profitless because of that.  You Christian people, be yourselves, after your own pattern.  And whilst you accept all help from surrounding suggestions and hints, make it ‘a very small thing that you be judged of men.’  And you, young men, in warehouses and shops, and you, students, and you, boys and girls, that are budding into life, never mind what other people say.  ‘Let thine eyes look right onwards,’ and let all the clatter on either side of you go on as it will.  The voices are very loud, but if we go up high enough on the hill-top, to the secret place of the Most High, we shall look down and see, but not hear, the bustle and the buzz; and in the great silence Christ will whisper to us, ’Well done! good and faithful servant.’  That praise is worth getting, and one way to get it is to put aside the hindrance of anxious seeking to conciliate the good opinion of men.

II.  Note the higher court of conscience.

Our Apostle is not to be taken here as contradicting what he says in other places.  ’I judge not mine own self,’—­yet in one of these same letters to the Corinthians he says, ’If we judged ourselves we should not be judged.’  So that he does not mean here that he is entirely without any estimate of his own character or actions.  That he did in some sense judge himself is evident from the next clause, because he goes on to say, ‘I know nothing against myself.’  If he acquitted himself, he must previously have been judging himself.  But his acquittal of himself is not to be understood as if it covered the whole ground of his life and character, but it is to be confined to the subject in hand—­viz. his faithfulness as a steward of the mysteries of God.  But though there is nothing in that region of his life which he can charge against himself as unfaithfulness, he goes on to say, ‘Yet am I not hereby justified?’

Our absolution by conscience is not infallible.  I suppose that conscience is more reliable when it condemns than when it acquits.  It is never safe for a man to neglect it when it says, ‘You are wrong!’ It is just as unsafe for a man to accept it, without further investigation, when it says, ‘You are right!’ For the only thing that is infallible about what we call conscience is its sentence, ’It is right to do right.’  But when it proceeds to say ’This, that, and the other thing is right; and therefore it is right for you to do it,’ there may be errors in the judgment, as everybody’s own experience tells them.  The inward judge needs to be stimulated, to be enlightened, to be corrected often.  I suppose that the growth of Christian character is very largely the discovery that things that we thought innocent are not, for us, so innocent as we thought them.