fourth shepherd of the Delectable Mountains is one of the very best of Bennett’s excellent portraits.  But Mr. Kerr Bain’s pen-and-ink portrait of Sincere in his People of the Pilgrimage is even better than Bennett’s excellent drawing.  ’Sincere is softer in outline and feature than Watchful.  His eye is full-open and lucid, with a face of mingled expressiveness and strength—­a lovable, lowly, pure-spirited man—­candid, considerate, willing, cheerful—­not speaking many words, and never any but true words.’  Happy sheep that have such a shepherd!  Happy people! if only any people in the Church of Christ could have such a pastor.

It is surely too late, too late or too early, to begin to put tests to a minister’s sincerity after he has been licensed and called and is now standing in the presence of his presbytery and surrounded with his congregation.  It is a tremendous enough question to put to any man at any time:  ’Are not zeal for the honour of God, love to Jesus Christ, and desire of saving souls your great motives and chief inducement to enter into the function of the holy ministry?’ A man who does not understand what it is you are saying to him will just make the same bow to these awful words that he makes to all your other conventional questions.  But the older he grows in his ministry, and the more he comes to discover the incurable plague of his own heart, and with that the whole meaning and full weight of your overwhelming words, the more will he shrink back from having such questions addressed to him.  Fools will rush in where Moses and Isaiah and Jeremiah and Peter and Paul feared to set their foot.  Paul was to be satisfied if only he was let do the work of a minister all his days and then was not at the end made a castaway.  And yet, writing to the same church, Paul says that his sincerity among them had been such that he could hold up his ministerial life like spotless linen between the eye of his conscience and the sun.  But all that was written and is to be read and understood as Paul’s ideal that he had honestly laboured after, rather than as an actual attainment he had arrived at.  Great as Paul’s attainments were in humility, in purity of intention, and in simplicity and sincerity of heart, yet the mind of Christ was not so given even to His most gifted apostle, that he could seriously say that he had attained to such utter ingenuity, simplicity, disengagement from himself, and surrender to Christ, as to be able to face the sun with a spotless ministry.  All he ever says at his boldest and best on that great matter is to be read in the light of his universal law of personal and apostolic imperfection—­Not that I have attained, either am already perfect; but I follow after.  And blessed be God that this is all that He looks for in any of His ministers, that they follow all their days after a more and more godly sincerity.  It was the apostle’s love of absolute sincerity,—­and, especially, it was his bitter hatred of all the remaining dregs