moves you to do this or that.  Stop sometimes and ask yourself why you do such and such a thing.  Did you ever hear of such a thing as a motive in a human heart?  And did your minister, watching for your soul, ever tell you that your soul will be lost or saved, condemned or justified at the last day according to your motives?  You never knew that!  You were never told that by your minister!  Miserable pair!  What does he take up his Sabbaths with?  And what leads you to waste your Sabbaths and your soul on such a stupid minister?  But, shepherd or no shepherd, minister or no minister, look to yourself.  Look to yourself when you lie down and when you rise up; when you go out and when you come in; when you are in the society of men and when you are alone with your own heart.  Look to yourself when men praise you, and look to yourself when men blame you.  Look to yourself when you sit down to eat and drink, and still more when you sit and speak about your absent brother.  Look to yourself when you meet your enemy or your rival in the street, when you pass his house, or hear or read his name.  Yes, you may well say so.  At that rate a man’s life would be all watching.  So it would.  And so it must.  And more than that, so it is with some men not far from you who never told you how much you have made them watch.  Did you never know all that till now?  Were you never told that every Christian man, I do not mean every communicant, but every truly and sincerely and genuinely Christian man watches himself in that way?  For as the one essential and distinguishing mark of a New Testament minister is not that he is an able man, or a studious man, or an eloquent man, but that he is a pastor and watches for souls, so it is the chiefest and the best mark, and to himself the only safe and infallible mark, that any man is a sincere and true Christian man, that he watches himself always and in all things looks first and last to himself.

SINCERE

   ’In all things showing sincerity.’—­Paul to Titus.

Charles Bennett has a delightful drawing of Sincere in Charles Kingsley’s beautiful edition of The Pilgrim’s Progress.  You feel that you could look all day into those clear eyes.  Your eyes would begin to quail before you had looked long into the fourth shepherd’s deep eyes; but those eyes of his have no cause to quail under yours.  This man has nothing to hide from you.  He never had.  He loves you, and his love to you is wholly without dissimulation.  He absolutely and unreservedly means and intends by you and yours all that he has ever said to you and yours, and much more than he has ever been able to say.  The owner of those deep blue eyes is as true to you when he is among your enemies as he is true to the truth itself when he is among your friends.  Mark also the unobtrusive strength of his mouth, all suffused over as it is with a most winning and reassuring sweetness.  The