ity of Paul himself. Are you,
then, a hard, stiff, severe, censorious, proud, angry, scornful man? Or
are you a too-easy, too-facile man-pleaser and self-seeker, being all
things to all men that you may make use of all men? Are you? Then say
so. Confess it to be so. Admit that you have found yourself out. And
reflect every day what you have got to do in life. Consider what a new
birth you need and must have. Number your days that are left you in
which to make you a new heart, and a new nature, and a new character.
Consider well how you are to set about that divine work. You have a
minister, and your minister is called a divine because by courtesy he is
supposed to understand that divine work, and to be engaged on it night
and day in himself, and in season and out of season among his people. He
will tell you how you are to make you a new heart. Or, if he does not
and cannot do that; if he preaches about everything but that to a people
who will listen to anything but that, then your soul is not in his hands
but in your own. You may not be able to choose your minister, but you
can choose what books you are to buy, or borrow, and read. And if there
is not a minister within a hundred miles of you who knows his right hand
from his left, then there are surely some booksellers who will advise you
about the classical books of the soul till you can order them for
yourselves. And thus, if it is your curse and your shame to be as
spongy, and soapy, and oily, and slippery as Anything himself; if you
choose your church and your reading with any originality, sense, and
insight, you need not fear but that you will be let live till you die an
honest, upright, honourable, fearless gentleman: no timid friend to
unfashionable truth, as you are to-night, but a man like Thomas Boston's
Ettrick elder, who lies waiting the last trump under a gravestone
engraven with this legend: Here lies a man who had a brow for every good
cause. Only, if you would have that written and read on your headstone,
you have no time to lose. If I were you I would not sit another Sabbath
under a minister whose preaching was not changing my nature, making my
heart new, and transforming my character; no, not though the Queen
herself sat in the same loft. And I would leave the church even of my
fathers, and become anything as far as churches go, if I could get a
minister who held my face close and ever closer up to my own heart. Nor
would I spend a shi