Writing about sincerity and a right intention in young ministers, old Drexilius says:  ’When I turn to clergymen, I would have sighs and groans to speak for me.  For, alas!  I am afraid that there be found some which come into the ministry, not that they may obtain a holy office in which to spend their life, but for worse ends.  To enter the ministry with a naughty intention is to come straight to destruction.  Let no minister think at any time of a better living, but only at all times of a holier life.  Wherefore, O ministers and spiritual men, consider and take heed.  There can be no safe guide to your office but a right, sincere, pure intention.  Whosoever cometh to it with any other conduct or companion must either return to his former state of life, or here he shall certainly perish . . .  What is more commendable in a religious man than to be always in action and to be exercised one while in teaching the ignorant, another while in comforting such as are troubled in mind, sometimes in making sermons, and sometimes in admonishing the sick?  But with what secret malignity doth a wrong intention insinuate itself into these very actions that are the most religious!  For ofttimes we desire nothing else but to be doing.  We desire to become public, not that we may profit many, but because we have not learned how to be private.  We seek for divers employments, not that we may avoid idleness, but that we may come into people’s knowledge.  We despise a small number of hearers, and such as are poor, simple, and rustical, and let fly our endeavours at more eminent chairs, though not in apparent pursuit; all which is the plain argument of a corrupt intention.  O ye that wait upon religion, O ministers of God, this is to sell most transcendent wares at a very low rate—­nay, this is to cast them, and yourselves too, into the fire.’

There are some outstanding temptations to insincerity in some ministers that must be pointed out here. (1) Ministers with a warm rhetorical temperament are beset continually with the temptation to pile up false fire on the altar; to dilate, that is, both in their prayers and in their sermons, upon certain topics in a style that is full of insincerity.  Ministers who have no real hold of divine things in themselves will yet fill their pulpit hour with the most florid and affecting pictures of sacred and even of evangelical things.  This is what our shrewd and satirical people mean when they say of us that So-and-so has a great sough of the gospel in his preaching, but the sough only. (2) Another kindred temptation to even the best and truest of ministers is to make pulpit appeals about the evil of sin and the necessity of a holy life that they themselves do not feel and do not attempt to live up to.  Butler has a terrible passage on the heart-hardening effects of making pictures of virtue and never trying to put those pictures into practice.  And readers of Newman will remember his powerful application of this same temptation to