In Thomas Boston's _Memoirs_ we continually come on entries like this: 'Preached on Ps.
xlii.

5, and mostly on my own account.' And, again, we read in the same invaluable book for parish ministers, that its author did not wonder to hear that good had been done by last Sabbath's sermon, because he had preached it to himself and had got good to himself out of it before he took it to the pulpit.

Boston kept his eye on himself in a way that the minister of Mansoul himself could not have excelled.

Till, not in his pulpit work only, but in such conventional, commonplace, and monotonous exercises as his family worship, he so read the Scriptures and so sang the psalms that his family worship was continually yielding him fruit as well as his public ministry.

As our family worship and our public ministry will do, too, when we have the eye and the heart and the conscience that Thomas Boston had.