Read the Diary of a M’Cheyne or the Confessions of an Augustine and you meet a man whose attitude to himself is disconcertingly different from that which you meet with typically in others. These great Christians viewed themselves with a sharply critical eye. They distrusted their every thought, motive and imagination. They each kept guard over themselves as a gaoler watches over his criminal inmates. They were out of love with themselves and knew themselves to be desperately sinful. They saw God, and nothing less, as supremely desirable. They felt holiness to be essential, even to Christian service.

It belongs to God to put the world right; the Christian’s first duty is to put himself right. In so doing the believer takes the first step towards influencing others for good. But it is a difficult and an unwelcome task and one in which he can expect little help or encouragement from others. Repentance and personal reformation are the least popular part of the believer’s duty and they are normally the last items on the agenda, especially in this busy age of activism.

This, however, is a mistake and one that explains the general failure everywhere. The spirit of the world around us has blighted our appetite for communion with God and for the pursuit of inward holiness. Men crave ‘success’ in every walk of life. Progress is defined not in terms of character but of measurable and material growth. Even the moral outrages which are occurring with increasing frequency at every level of our society are incapable of proving to men that the true gold standard is not the dollar or the pound but the spiritual condition of the human heart. Experience teaches that the average Christian today, and the average church in which he is a member, is fashioned into conformity to the world far more than is realised. For every one book which is published on repentance and mortification there are a hundred which attempt to promote ‘church growth’ or else point the believer along the road to ‘success’. If the progress cannot be measured in quantitative terms it is judged unworthy of notice. As a direct consequence, the religion of the day is almost everywhere wafer thin and paper thin. Maturity is not to be found because it is not encouraged. Depths of soul or of mind are not met with because believers have no time left to cultivate the hidden man of the heart. Every spare minute must be devoted to rotating the treadmill of outward activity.

This disease of spiritual restlessness has afflicted most men who aspire to enter the pulpit. It is no longer important for a preacher to know very much. The favoured sermon is the one which skims cheerfully over the wave-tops of a text and breezily carries the hearers to familiar thoughts with no emotional crisis along the route. Provided the length be not above twenty minutes the sermon may go where it will, supping like a bee in a hundred tiny flowers as it meanders along. The old-fashioned theological sermon which imparted to hearers a ton of truth is no more expected today than it is welcomed. The modem preacher’s task is to charm, not change or challenge his audience. The preaching of a Chalmers or an Edwards is praised, and the spiritual revolution which their preaching caused is talked of with wonderment. But any thought as to its modem repetition is far from the mind.

Do We Know Ourselves?

The fault at the root of all our other faults, so it appears to us, is that our attitude to ourselves is wrong. Read the Diary of a M’Cheyne or the Confessions of an Augustine and you meet a man whose attitude to himself is disconcertingly different from that which you meet with typically in others. These great Christians viewed themselves with a sharply critical eye. They distrusted their every thought, motive and imagination. They each kept guard over themselves as a gaoler watches over his criminal inmates. They were out of love with themselves and knew themselves to be desperately sinful. They saw God, and nothing less, as supremely desirable. They felt holiness to be essential, even to Christian service.

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