If a minister falls into any kind of inconsistency or sin, if a professing Christian makes a bad failure in Manchester, what a talk there is, and what a pointing of fingers!  We sometimes think it is hard; it is all right.  It is just what should be meted out to us.  Let us remember that unslumbering tribunal which sits in judgment upon all our professions, and is very ready to condemn, and very slow to acquit.

III.  Notice, again, the unblemished record.

These men could find no fault, ‘forasmuch as Daniel was faithful.’  Neither was there any error’—­of judgment, that is,—­’or fault’—­dereliction of duty, that is,—­’found in him.’  They were very poor judges of his religion, and they did not try to judge that; but they were very good judges of his conduct as prime minister, and they did judge that.  The world is a very poor critic of my Christianity, but it is a very sufficient one of my conduct.  It may not know much about the inward emotions of the Christian life, and the experiences in which the Christian heart expatiates and loves to dwell, but it knows what short lengths, and light weights, and bad tempers, and dishonesty, and selfishness are.  And it is by our conduct, in the things that they and we do together, that worldly men judge what we are in the solitary depths where we dwell in communion with God.  It is useless for Christians to be talking, as so many of them are fond of doing, about their spiritual experiences and their religious joy, and all the other sweet and sacred things which belong to the silent life of the spirit in God, unless, side by side with these, there is the doing of the common deeds which the world is actually able to appraise in such a fashion as to extort, even from them, the confession, ’We find no occasion against this man.’

You remember the pregnant, quaint old saying, ’If a Christian man is a shoeblack, he ought to be the best shoeblack in the parish.’  If we call ourselves Christians, we are bound, by the very name, to live in such a fashion as that men shall have no doubt of the reality of our profession and of the depth of our fellowship with Christ.  It is by our common conduct that they judge us.  And the ‘Christian Endeavourer’ needs to remember, whether he or she be old or young, that the best sign of the reality of the endeavour is the doing of common things with absolute rightness, because they are done wholly for Christ’s sake.

It is a sharp test, and I wonder how many of us would like to go out into the world, and say to all the irreligious people who know us, ’Now come and tell me what the faults are that you have seen in me.’  There would be a considerable response to the invitation, and perhaps some of us would learn to know ourselves rather better than we have been able to do.  ’We shall not find any occasion in this Daniel’—­I wonder if they would find it in that Daniel—­’except we find it concerning the law of his God.’  There is a record for a man!