You only need to go back to history, or to go down into your own histories, to see how, as light has increased, dark corners have been revealed that were invisible in the less brilliant illumination.  How long it has taken the Christian Church to find out what Christ’s Gospel teaches about slavery, about the relations of sex, about drunkenness, about war, about a hundred other things that you and I do not yet know, but which our successors will wonder that we failed to see!  Inquisitor and martyr have equally said, ’We are serving God.’  Surely, too, nothing is more clearly witnessed by individual experience, than that we may do a wrong thing, and think that it is right.  ‘They that kill you will think that they do God service.’

So, Christian people, accept the inward monition when it is stern and prohibitive.  Do not be too sure about it when it is placable and permissive.  ’Happy is he that condemneth not himself in the thing which he alloweth.’  There may be secret faults, lying all unseen beneath the undergrowth in the forest, which yet do prick and sting.  The upper floors of the house where we receive company, and where we, the tenants, generally live, may be luxurious, and sweet, and clean.  What about the cellars, where ugly things crawl and swarm, and breed, and sting?

Ah, dear brethren! when my conscience says to me, ‘You may do it,’ it is always well to go to Jesus Christ, and say to Him ‘May I?’ ’Search me, O God, and ... see if there be any wicked way in me,’ and show it to me, and help me to cast it out.  ’I know nothing against myself; yet am I not hereby justified.’

III.  Lastly, note the supreme court of final appeal.

‘He that judgeth me is the Lord.’  Now it is obvious that ‘the Lord’ here is Christ, both because of the preceding context and because of the next verse, which speaks of His coming.  And it is equally obvious, though it is often unnoticed, that the judgment of which the Apostle is here speaking is a present and preliminary judgment.  ’He that judgeth me’—­not, ‘will judge,’ but now, at this very moment.  That is to say, whilst people round us are passing their superficial estimates upon me, and whilst my conscience is excusing, or else accusing me—­and in neither case with absolute infallibility—­there is another judgment, running concurrently with them, and going on in silence.  That calm eye is fixed upon me, and sifting me, and knowing me. That judgment is not fallible, because before Him ‘the hidden things’ that the darkness shelters, those creeping things in the cellars that I was speaking about, are all manifest; and to Him the ‘counsels of the heart,’ that is, the motives from which the actions flow, are all transparent and legible.  So His judgment, the continual estimate of me which Jesus Christ, in His supreme knowledge of me, has, at every moment of my life—­that is uttering the final word about me and my character.

His estimate will dwindle the sentences of the other two tribunals into nothingness.  What matter what his fellow-servants say about the steward’s accounts, and distribution of provisions, and management of the household?  He has to render his books, and to give account of his stewardship, only to his lord.