literary men in his fine sermon on Unreal Words. (3) Another temptation is to affect an interest in our people and a sympathy with them that we do not in reality feel.  All human life is full of this temptation to double-dealing and hypocrisy; but, then, it is large part of a minister’s office to feel with and for his people, and to give the tenderest and the most sacred expression to that feeling.  And, unless he is a man of a scrupulously sincere, true, and tender heart, his daily duties will soon develop him into a solemn hypocrite.  And if he feels only for his own people, and for them only when they become and as long as they remain his own people, then his insincerity and imposture is only the more abominable in the sight of God. (4) Archbishop Whately, with that strong English common sense and that cultivated clear-headedness that almost make him a writer of genius, points out a view of sincerity that it behoves ministers especially to cultivate in themselves.  He tells us not only to act always according to our convictions, but also to see that our convictions are true and unbiassed convictions.  It is a very superficial sincerity even when we actually believe what we profess to believe.  But that is a far deeper and a far nobler sincerity which watches with a strict and severe jealousy over the formation of our beliefs and convictions.  Ministers must, first for themselves and then for their people, live far deeper down than other men.  They must be at home among the roots, not of actions only, but much more of convictions.  We may act honestly enough out of our present convictions and principles, while, all the time, our convictions and our principles are vitiated at bottom by the selfish ground they ultimately stand in.  Let ministers, then, to begin with, live deep down among the roots of their opinions and their beliefs.  Let them not only flee from being consciously insincere and hypocritical men; let them keep their eye like the eye of God continually on that deep ground of the soul where so many men unknown to themselves deceive themselves.  And, thus exercised, they shall be able out of a deep and clean heart to rise far above that trimming and hedging and self-seeking and self-sheltering in disputed and unpopular questions which is such a temptation to all men, and is such a shame and scandal in a minister.

Now, my good friends, we have kept all this time to the fourth shepherd and to his noble name, but let us look in closing at some of his sheep,—­that is to say, at ourselves.  For is it not said in the prophet:  Ye my flock, the flock of my pasture, are men, and I am your God, saith the Lord God.  All, therefore, that has been said about the sincerity and insincerity of ministers is to be said equally of their people also in all their special and peculiar walks of life.  Sincerity is as noble a virtue, and insincerity is as detestable a vice, in a doctor, or a lawyer, or a schoolmaster, or a merchant,—­almost,