ray anxiety about self; John was not thinking of himself. He was
thinking of God's offended law, and the guilty king's soul. Brethren,
it is a lovely and a graceful thing to see men natural. It is
beautiful to see men sincere without being haunted with the
consciousness of their sincerity. There is a sickly habit that men get
of looking into themselves, and thinking how they are appearing. We
are always unnatural when we do that. The very tread of one who is
thinking how he appears to others, becomes dizzy with affectation. He
is too conscious of what he is doing, and self-consciousness is
affectation. Let us aim at being natural. And we can only become
natural by thinking of God and duty, instead of the way in which we
are serving God and duty.

There was lastly, something exceedingly unselfish in John's
truthfulness. We do not build much on a man's being merely true. It
costs some men nothing to be true, for they have none of those
sensibilities which shrink from inflicting pain. There is a surly
bitter way of speaking truth which says little for a man's heart. Some
men have not delicacy enough to feel that it is an awkward and a
painful thing to rebuke a brother: they are in their element when they
can become censors of the great. John's truthfulness was not like
that. It was the earnest loving nature of the man which made him say
sharp things. Was it to gratify spleen that he reproved Herod for all
the evils he had done? Was it to minister to a diseased and
disappointed misanthropy? Little do we understand the depth of
tenderness which there is in a rugged, true nature, if we think that.
John's whole life was an iron determination to crush self in
everything.

Take a single instance. John's ministry was gradually superseded by
the ministry of Christ. It was the moon waning before the Sun. They
came and told him that, "Rabbi, He to whom thou barest witness beyond
Jordan baptizeth, and all men come unto Him." Two of his own personal
friends, apparently some of the last he had left, deserted him, and
went to the new teacher.

And now let us estimate the keenness of that trial. Remember John was
a man: he had tasted the sweets of influence; that influence was dying
away, and just in the prime of life he was to become _nothing_. Who
cannot conceive the keenness of that trial? Bearing that in mind--what
is the prophet's answer? One of the most touching sentences in all
Scripture--