SINCERE

'In all things showing sincerity.'--Paul to Titus.

Charles Bennett has a delightful drawing of Sincere in Charles Kingsley's

beautiful edition of _The Pilgrim's Progress_. You feel that you could

look all day into those clear eyes. Your eyes would begin to quail

before you had looked long into the fourth shepherd's deep eyes; but

those eyes of his have no cause to quail under yours. This man has

nothing to hide from you. He never had. He loves you, and his love to

you is wholly without dissimulation. He absolutely and unreservedly

means and intends by you and yours all that he has ever said to you and

yours, and much more than he has ever been able to say. The owner of

those deep blue eyes is as true to you when he is among your enemies as

he is true to the truth itself when he is among your friends. Mark also

the unobtrusive strength of his mouth, all suffused over as it is with a

most winning and reassuring sweetness. The fourth shepherd of the

Delectable Mountains is one of the very best of Bennett's excellent

portraits. But Mr. Kerr Bain's pen-and-ink portrait of Sincere in his

_People of the Pilgrimage_ is even better than Bennett's excellent

drawing. 'Sincere is softer in outline and feature than Watchful. His

eye is full-open and lucid, with a face of mingled expressiveness and

strength--a lovable, lowly, pure-spirited man--candid, considerate,

willing, cheerful--not speaking many words, and never any but true

words.' Happy sheep that have such a shepherd! Happy people! if only

any people in the Church of Christ could have such a pastor.

It is surely too late, too late or too early, to begin to put tests to a

minister's sincerity after he has been licensed and called and is now

standing in the presence of his presbytery and surrounded with his

congregation. It is a tremendous enough question to put to any man at

any time: 'Are not zeal for the honour of God, love to Jesus Christ, 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. And till it is a good conscience we shall

hold up with it a broken heart. And that genuine love of all sincerity,

and that equally genuine hatred of all remaining insincerity, will make

all our ministerial work, as it made all Paul's apostolic work, not only

acceptable, but will also make its very defects and defeats both

acceptable and fruitful in the estimation and result of God. It so

happens that I am reading for my own private purposes at this moment an

old book of 1641, Drexilius _On a Right Intention_, and I cannot do

better at this point than share with you the page I am just reading. 'Not

to be too much troubled or daunted at any cross event,' he says, 'is the

happy state of his mind who has entered on any enterprise with a pure and

pious intention. That great apostle James gained no more than eight

persons in all Spain when he was called to lay down his head under

Herod's sword. And was not God ready to give the same reward to James as

to those who converted kings and whole kingdoms? Surely He was. For God

does not give His ministers a charge as to what they shall effect, but

only as to what they shall intend to effect. Wherefore, when his art

faileth a servant of God, when nothing goes forward, when everything

turneth to his ruin, even when his hope is utterly void, he is scarce one

whit troubled; for this, saith he to himself, is not in my power, but in

God's power alone. I have done what I could. I have done what was fit

for me to do. Fair and foul is all of God's disposing.'

And, then, this simplicity and purity of intention gives a minister that

fine combination of candour and considerateness which we saw to exist

together so harmoniously in the character of Sincere. Such a minister is

not tongue-tied with sinister and selfish intentions. His sincerity

toward God gives him a masterful position among his people. His words of

rebuke and warning go straight to his people's consciences because they

come straight out of his own conscience. His words are their own witness

that he is neither fearing his people nor fawning upon his people in

speaking to them. And, then, such candour prepares the way for the

utmost considerateness when the proper time comes for considerateness.

Such a minister is patient with the stupid, and even with the wicked and

the injurious, because in all their stupidity and wickedness and

injuriousness they have only injured and impoverished themselves. And if

God is full of patience and pity for the ignorant and the evil and the

out of the way, then His sincere-hearted minister is of all men the very

man to carry the divine message of forgiveness and instruction to such

sinners. Yes, Mr. Bain must have seen Sincere closely and in a clear

light when he took down this fine feature of his character, that he is at

once candid and considerate--with a whole face of mingled expressiveness

and strength.

Writing about sincerity and a right intention in young ministers, old

Drexilius says: 'When I turn to clergymen, I would have sighs and groans

to speak for me. For, alas! I am afraid that there be found some which

come into the ministry, not that they may obtain a holy office in which

to spend their life, but for worse ends. To enter the ministry with a

naughty intention is to come straight to destruction. Let no minister

think at any time of a better living, but only at all times of a holier

life. Wherefore, O ministers and spiritual men, consider and take heed.

There can be no safe guide to your office but a right, sincere, pure

intention. Whosoever cometh to it with any other conduct or companion

must either return to his former state of life, or here he shall

certainly perish . . . What is more commendable in a religious man than

to be always in action and to be exercised one while in teaching the

ignorant, another while in comforting such as are troubled in mind,

sometimes in making sermons, and sometimes in admonishing the sick? But

with what secret malignity doth a wrong intention insinuate itself into

these very actions that are the most religious! For ofttimes we desire

nothing else but to be doing. We desire to become public, not that we

may profit many, but because we have not learned how to be private. We

seek for divers employments, not that we may avoid idleness, but that we

may come into people's knowledge. We despise a small number of hearers,

and such as are poor, simple, and rustical, and let fly our endeavours at

more eminent chairs, though not in apparent pursuit; all which is the

plain argument of a corrupt intention. O ye that wait upon religion, O

ministers of God, this is to sell most transcendent wares at a very low

rate--nay, this is to cast them, and yourselves too, into the fire.'

There are some outstanding temptations to insincerity in some ministers

that must be pointed out here. (1) Ministers with a warm rhetorical

temperament are beset continually with the temptation to pile up false

fire on the altar; to dilate, that is, both in their prayers and in their

sermons, upon certain topics in a style that is full of insincerity.

Ministers who have no real hold of divine things in themselves will yet

fill their pulpit hour with the most florid and affecting pictures of

sacred and even of evangelical things. This is what our shrewd and

satirical people mean when they say of us that So-and-so has a great

_sough_ of the gospel in his preaching, but the _sough_ only. (2)

Another kindred temptation to even the best and truest of ministers is to

make pulpit appeals about the evil of sin and the necessity of a holy

life that they themselves do not feel and do not attempt to live up to.

Butler has a terrible passage on the heart-hardening effects of making

pictures of virtue and never trying to put those pictures into practice.

And readers of Newman will remember his powerful application of this same

temptation to 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, 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.

'O Eternal God, Who hast made all things for man, and man for Thy glory,

sanctify my body and my soul, my thoughts and my intentions, my words and

my actions, that whatsoever I shall think or speak or do may be by me

designed to the glory of Thy name. O God, turn my necessities into

virtue, and the works of nature into the works of grace, by making them

orderly, regular, temperate, subordinate, and profitable to ends beyond

their own proper efficacy. And let no pride or self-seeking, no

covetousness or revenge, no impure mixtures or unhandsome purposes, no

little ends and low imaginations, pollute my spirit or unhallow any of my

words or actions. But let my body be the servant of my spirit, and both

soul and body servants of my Lord, that, doing all things for Thy glory

here, I may be made a partaker of Thy glory hereafter; through Jesus

Christ, my Lord. Amen.'