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 of insincerity that he from time to time detected in his
own heart,--it was this that gave him his good conscience before a God of
pity and compassion, truth and grace. And with something of the same
love of perfect sincerity, accompanied with something of the same hatred
of insincerity and of ourselves on account of it, we, too, toward this
same God of pity and compassion, will hold up a conscience that would
fain be a good conscience