Look to yourself when you lie down and when you rise up; when
you go out and when you come in; when you are in the society of men and
when you are alone with your own heart. Look to yourself when men praise
you, and look to yourself when men blame you. Look to yourself when you
sit down to eat and drink, and still more when you sit and speak about
your absent brother. Look to yourself when you meet your enemy or your
rival in the street, when you pass his house, or hear or read his name.
Yes, you may well say so. At that rate a man's life would be all
watching. So it would. And so it must. And more than that, so it is
with some men not far from you who never told you how much you have made
them watch. Did you never know all that till now? Were you never told
that every Christian man, I do not mean every communicant, but every
truly and sincerely and genuinely Christian man watches himself in that
way? For as the one essential and distinguishing mark of a New Testament
minister is not that he is an able man, or a studious man, or an eloquent
man, but that he is a pastor and watches for souls, so it is the chiefest
and the best mark, and to himself the only safe and infallible mark, that
any man is a sincere and true Christian man, that he watches himself
always and in all things looks first and last to himself.
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