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.
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