if not altogether, as much so as in a minister.  Your insincerity and hypocrisy in your daily intercourse with your friends and neighbours is a miserable enough state of mind, but at the root of all that there lies your radical insincerity toward God and your own soul.  In his Christian Perfection William Law introduces his readers to a character called Julius, who goes regularly to prayers, and there confesses himself to be a miserable sinner who has no health in him; and yet that same Julius cannot bear to be informed of any imperfection or suspected to be wanting in any kind or degree of virtue.  Now, Law asks, can there be a stronger proof that Julius is wanting in the sincerity of his devotions?  Is it not as plain as anything can be that that man’s confessions of sin are only words of course, a certain civility of sacred speech in which his heart has not a single atom of share?  Julius confesses himself to be in great weakness, corruption, disorder, and infirmity, and yet he is mortally angry with you if at any time you remotely and tenderly hint that he may be just a shade wrong in his opinions, or one hair’s-breadth off what is square and correct in his actions.  Look to yourself, Julius, and to your insincere heart.  Look to yourself at all times, but above all other times at the times and in the places of your devotions.  Ten to one, my hearer of to-night, you may never have thought of that before.  And what would you think if you were told that this Sincere shepherd was appointed us for this evening’s discourse, and that you were led up to this house, just that you might have your attention turned to your many miserable insincerities of all kinds, but especially to your so Julius-like devotions?  ’And Nathan said unto David, Thou art the man.  And David said unto Nathan, I have sinned against the Lord.’

What, then, my truly miserable fellow-sinner and fellow-worshipper, what are we to do?  Am I to give up preaching altogether because I am continually carried on under the impulse of the pulpit far beyond both my attainments and my intentions?  Am I to cease from public prayer altogether because when engaged in it I am compelled to utter words of contrition and confession and supplication that little agree with the everyday temper and sensibility of my soul?  And am I wholly to eschew pastoral work because my heart is not so absolutely clean and simple and sincere toward all my own people and toward other ministers’ people as it ought to be?  No!  Never!  Never!  Let me rather keep my heart of such earth and slag in the hottest place of temptation, and then, such humiliating discoveries as are there continually being made to me of myself will surely at last empty me of all self-righteousness and self-sufficiency, and make me at the end of my ministry, if not till then, the penitent pastor of a penitent people.  And when thus penitent, then surely, also somewhat more sincere in my designs and intentions, if not even then in my attainments and performances.