(save the mark) influence us in the earnestness of our
Christian work to far too great an extent. And I dare say there are good
friends among us who, if they would be quite honest with themselves,
would take the hint, and, if I may use such a word, the rebuke, to
themselves.

Dear brethren, all the work that any of us do has to become unnoticed
after a little while. It will not last. Nobody will know about you or me
thirty years after we are dead. What does it matter whether they know
anything about us, or say anything about us, or pat us on the back for
anything that we do, or recognise our service whilst we live? Surely, if
we are Christian men and women, we have a better reason for working than
that. '_I_ will never forget any of their works.' That ought to be
enough for us, ought it not? Whoever forgets, He remembers; and if He
remembers, He will not remain in our debt for anything that we have
done.

So let us keep on, noticed or unnoticed; it matters very little which it
is. There is a fillip, no doubt--and we should not be men and women if
we did not feel it--in the recognition of what we have tried to do. And
sometimes it comes to us; but the absence of it is no reason for
slackening our work. And this man, so patiently and persistently
'pegging away' at his obscure task during all these years which have
been swallowed up in oblivion, may preach a sermon to us all.

Only let us remember that he also shows us that unnoticed work is
noticed, and that unrecorded services are recorded. Here are you and I,
nineteen centuries after he is dead, talking about him, and his name
will live and last as long as the world, because, though written in no
other history, it has been recorded here. Jesus Christ's record, the
Book of Life, contains the names of 'fellow-labourers' whose names have
dropped out of every other record; and that should be enough for us.
Sylvanus did no work that Christ did not see, and no work that Christ
did not remember, and no work of which he did not, eighteen hundred
years since, enter into the enjoyment of the fruit, and which he enjoys
up there, whilst we are thinking about him down here.

III. The last thing that I would suggest is--here is an example to us of
a character which we can all earn, and which will be the best that any
man can get.

A great genius, a wise philosopher, an eloquent preacher, a statesman, a
warrior, poet, painter? No! 'A faithful brother.' He may have been a
common