We are all close by one another; our voices are very audible to each other.  Do you learn, Christian people, that the first,—­or at least a prime—­condition of all Christian and Christ-pleasing life, is a wholesome disregard of what anybody says but Himself.  The old Lacedaemonians used to stir themselves to heroism by the thought:  ‘What will they say of us in Sparta?’ The governor of some outlying English colony minds very little what the people that he is set to rule think about him.  He reports to Downing Street, and it is the opinion of the Home Government that influences him.  You report to headquarters.  Never mind what anybody else thinks of you.  Your business is to please Christ, and the less you trouble yourselves about pleasing men the more you will succeed in doing it.  Be deaf to the tittle tattle of your fellow soldiers in the ranks.  It is your Commander’s smile that will be your highest reward.

  ’Fame is no plant that grows on mortal soil,
  But lives and spreads aloft by those pure eyes,
  And perfect witness of all-judging Jove;
  As he pronounces lastly on each deed,
  Of so much fame in heaven expect thy meed.’

THE LOVE THAT CONSTRAINS

   ’The love of Christ constraineth us.’—­2 COR. v. 14.

It is a dangerous thing to be unlike other people.  It is still more dangerous to be better than other people.  The world has a little heap of depreciatory terms which it flings, age after age, at all men who have a higher standard and nobler aims than their fellows.  A favourite term is ‘mad.’  So, long ago they said, ’The prophet is a fool; the spiritual man is mad,’ and, in His turn, Jesus was said to be ‘beside Himself,’ and Festus shouted from the judgment-seat to Paul that he was mad.  A great many people had said the same thing about him before, as the context shows.  For the verse before my text is:  ’Whether we be beside ourselves, it is to God:  or whether we be sober, it is for your cause.’  Now the former clause can only refer to other people’s estimate of the Apostle.  No doubt there were many things about him that gave colour to it.  He said that a dead Man had appeared to him and spoken with him.  He said that he had been carried up into the third heaven.  He had a very strange creed in the judgment of the times.  He had abandoned a brilliant career for a very poor one.  He was obviously utterly indifferent to the ordinary aims of men.  He had a consuming enthusiasm.  And so the world explained him satisfactorily to itself by the short and easy method of saying, ‘Insane.’  And Paul explained himself by the great word of my text, ‘The love of Christ constraineth us.’  Wherever there is a life adequately under the influence of Christ’s love the results will be such as an unsympathising world may call madness, but which are the perfection of sober-mindedness.  Would there were more such madmen!  I wish to try to make one or two of them now, by getting some of you to take for your motto, ‘The love of Christ constraineth us.’