His reproof comes out as the natural impulse of an earnest heart.  John was the last of all men to feel that he had done anything extraordinary.  And this we hold to be an inseparable mark of truth.  No true man is conscious that he is true; he is rather conscious of insincerity.  No brave man is conscious of his courage; bravery is natural to him.  The skin of Moses’ face shone after he had been with God, but Moses wist not of it.

There are many of us who would have prefaced that rebuke with a long speech.  We should have begun by observing how difficult it was to speak to a monarch, how delicate the subject, how much proof we were giving of our friendship.  We should have asked the great man to accept it as a proof of our devotion.  John does nothing of this.  Prefaces betray anxiety about self; John was not thinking of himself.  He was thinking of God’s offended law, and the guilty king’s soul.  Brethren, it is a lovely and a graceful thing to see men natural.  It is beautiful to see men sincere without being haunted with the consciousness of their sincerity.  There is a sickly habit that men get of looking into themselves, and thinking how they are appearing.  We are always unnatural when we do that.  The very tread of one who is thinking how he appears to others, becomes dizzy with affectation.  He is too conscious of what he is doing, and self-consciousness is affectation.  Let us aim at being natural.  And we can only become natural by thinking of God and duty, instead of the way in which we are serving God and duty.

There was lastly, something exceedingly unselfish in John’s truthfulness.  We do not build much on a man’s being merely true.  It costs some men nothing to be true, for they have none of those sensibilities which shrink from inflicting pain.  There is a surly bitter way of speaking truth which says little for a man’s heart.  Some men have not delicacy enough to feel that it is an awkward and a painful thing to rebuke a brother:  they are in their element when they can become censors of the great.  John’s truthfulness was not like that.  It was the earnest loving nature of the man which made him say sharp things.  Was it to gratify spleen that he reproved Herod for all the evils he had done?  Was it to minister to a diseased and disappointed misanthropy?  Little do we understand the depth of tenderness which there is in a rugged, true nature, if we think that.  John’s whole life was an iron determination to crush self in everything.

Take a single instance.  John’s ministry was gradually superseded by the ministry of Christ.  It was the moon waning before the Sun.  They came and told him that, “Rabbi, He to whom thou barest witness beyond Jordan baptizeth, and all men come unto Him.”  Two of his own personal friends, apparently some of the last he had left, deserted him, and went to the new teacher.

And now let us estimate the keenness of