society to a more democratic form give the many-headed monster and
its many tongues far more power than is wholesome, in the shaping of
the lives and character and conduct of most men. The evil of
democracy is that it levels down all to one plane, and that it tends
to turn out millions of people, as like each other as if they had
been made in a machine. And so we need, I believe, even more than our
fathers did, to lay to heart this lesson, that the direct result of a
deep and strong Christian faith is the production of intensely
individual character. And if there are plenty of angles in it,
perhaps so much the better. We are apt to be rounded by being rubbed
against each other, like the stones on the beach, till there is not a
sharp corner or a point that can prick anywhere. So society becomes
utterly monotonous, and is insipid and profitless because of that.
You Christian people, be yourselves, after your own pattern. And
whilst you accept all help from surrounding suggestions and hints,
make it 'a very small thing that you be judged of men.' And you,
young men, in warehouses and shops, and you, students, and you, boys
and girls, that are budding into life, never mind what other people
say. 'Let thine eyes look right onwards,' and let all the clatter on
either side of you go on as it will. The voices are very loud, but if
we go up high enough on the hill-top, to the secret place of the Most
High, we shall look down and see, but not hear, the bustle and the
buzz; and in the great silence Christ will whisper to us, 'Well done!
good and faithful servant.' That praise is worth getting, and one way
to get it is to put aside the hindrance of anxious seeking to
conciliate the good opinion of men.

II. Note the higher court of conscience.

Our Apostle is not to be taken here as contradicting what he says in
other places. 'I judge not mine own self,'--yet in one of these same
letters to the Corinthians he says, 'If we judged ourselves we should
not be judged.' So that he does not mean here that he is entirely
without any estimate of his own character or actions. That he did in
some sense judge himself is evident from the next clause, because he
goes on to say, 'I know nothing against myself.' If he acquitted
himself, he must previously have been judging himself. But his
acquittal of himself is not to be understood as if it covered the
whole ground of his life and character, but it is to be confined to
the subject in hand--viz