'Learn of Me, for I am meek and lowly in heart.'--_Our Lord_.
'Be clothed with humility.'--_Peter_.
'God's chiefest saints are the least in their own eyes.'--_A Kempis_.
'Without humility all our other virtues are but vices.'--_Pascal_.
'Humility does not consist in having a worse opinion of ourselves than
we deserve.'--_Law_.
'Humility lies close upon the heart, and its tests are exceedingly
delicate and subtle.'--_Newman_.
Our familiar English word 'humility' comes down to us from the Latin root
_humus_, which means the earth or the ground. Humility, therefore, is
that in the mind and in the heart of a man which is low down even to the
very earth. A humble-minded man may not have learning enough to know the
etymology of the name which best describes his character, but the divine
nature which is in him teaches him to look down, to walk meekly and
softly, and to speak seldom, and always in love. For humility, while it
takes its lowly name from earth, all the time has its true nature from
heaven. Humility is full of all meekness, modesty, submissiveness,
teachableness, sense of inability, sense of unworthiness, sense of ill-
desert. Till, with that new depth and new intensity that the Scriptures
and religious experience have given to this word, as to so many other
words, humility, in the vocabulary of the spiritual life, has come to be
applied to that low estimate of ourselves which we come to form and to
entertain as we are more and more enlightened about God and about
ourselves; about the majesty, glory, holiness, beauty, and blessedness of
the divine nature, and about our own unspeakable evil, vileness, and
misery as sinners. And, till humility has come to rank in Holy
Scripture, and in the lives and devotions of all God's saints, as at once
the deepest root and the ripest fruit of all the divine graces that enter
into, and, indeed, constitute the life of God in the heart of man.
Humility, evangelical humility, sings Edwards in his superb and seraphic
poem the _Religious Affections_,--evangelical humility is the sense that
the true Christian has of his own utter insufficiency, despicableness,
and odiousness, a sense which is peculiar to the true saint. But to
compensate the true saint for this sight and sense of himself, he has
revealed to him an accompanying sense of the absolutely transcendent
beauty of the divine nature and of all divine things; a sight and a sense
that quite overcome the heart and change to holiness all the dispositions
and inclinations and affections of the heart. The essence of evangelical
humility, says Edwards, consists in such humility as becomes a creature
in himself exceeding sinful, but at the same time, under a dispensation
of grace, and this is the greatest and most essential thing in all true
religion.
1. Well, then, our Mr. Humble was a juryman in Mansoul, and his name and
his nature eminently fitted him for his office. I never was a juryman;
but, if I were, I feel sure I would come home from the court a far
humbler man than I went up to it. I cannot imagine how a judge can
remain a proud man, or an advocate, or a witness, or a juryman, or a
spectator, or even a policeman. I am never in a criminal court that I do
not tremble with terror all the time. I say to myself all the
time,--there stands John Newton but for the preventing grace of God. 'I
will not sit as a judge to try General Boulanger, because I hate him,'
said M. Renault in the French Senate. Mr. Humble himself could not have
made a better speech to the bench than that when his name was called to
be sworn. Let us all remember John Newton and M. Renault when we would
begin to write or to speak about any arrested, accused, found-out man.
Let other men's arrests, humiliations, accusations, and sentences only
make us search well our own past, and that will make us ever humbler and
ever humbler men ourselves; ever more penitent men, and ever more
prayerful men.
2. And then Miss Humble-mind, his only daughter, was a servant-maid.
There is no office so humble but that a humble mind will not put on still
more humility in it. What a lesson in humility, not Peter only got that
night in the upper room, but that happy servant-maid also who brought in
the bason and the towel. Would she ever after that night grumble and
give up her place in a passion because she had been asked to do what was
beneath her to do? Would she ever leave that house for any wages? Would
she ever see that bason without kissing it? Would that towel not be a
holy thing ever after in her proud eyes? How happy that house would ever
after that night be, not so much because the Lord's Supper had been
instituted in it, as because a servant was in it who had learned humility
as she went about the house that night. Let all our servants hold up
their heads and magnify their office. Their Master was once a servant,
and He left us all, and all servants especially, an example that they
should follow in His steps. Peter, whose feet were washed that night,
never forgot that night, and his warm heart always warmed to a servant
when he saw her with her bason and her towels, till he gave her half a
chapter to herself in his splendid First Epistle. 'Servants, be
subject,' he said, till his argument rose to a height above which not
even Paul himself ever rose. Servant-maids, you must all have your own
half-chapter out of First Peter by heart.
3. But I have as many students of one kind or other here to-night as I
have maid-servants, and they will remember where a great student has said
that knowledge without love but puffeth a student up. Now, the best
knowledge for us all, and especially so for a student, is to know
himself: his own ignorance, his own foolishness, his blindness of mind,
and, especially, his corruption of heart. For that knowledge will both
keep him from being puffed up with what he already knows, and it will
also put him and keep him in the way of knowing more. Self-knowledge
will increase humility, and all the past masters both of science and of
religion will tell him that humility is the certain note of the true
student. You who are students all know _The Advancement of Learning_,
just as the servants sitting beside you all know the second chapter of
First Peter. Well, your master Verulam there tells you, and indeed on
every page of his, that it is only to a humble, waiting, childlike temper
that nature, like grace, will ever reveal up her secrets. 'There is
small chance of truth at the goal when there is not a childlike humility
at the starting-post.' Well, then, all you students who would fain get
to the goal of science, make the Church of Christ your starting-post.
Come first and come continually to the Christian school to learn
humility, and then, as long as your talents, your years, and your
opportunities hold out, both truth and goodness will open up to you at
every step. Every step will be a goal, and at every goal a new step will
open up. And God's smile and God's blessing, and all good men's love and
honour and applause will support and reward you in your race. And,
humble-minded to the truth herself, be, at the same time, humble-minded
toward all who like yourself are seeking to know and to do the truth. A
lately deceased student of nature was a pattern to all students as long
as he waited on truth in his laboratory; and even as long as he remained
at his desk to tell the world what he and other students had discovered
in their search. But when any other student in his search after truth
was compelled to cross that hitherto so exemplary student, he immediately
became as insolent as if he had been the greatest boor in the country.
Till, as he spat out scorn at all who differed from him we always
remembered this in A Kempis--'Surely, an humble husbandman that serveth
God is better than a proud philosopher that, neglecting himself,
laboureth to understand the course of the heavens. It is great wisdom
and perfection to esteem nothing of ourselves, and to think always well
and highly of others.' Students of arts, students of philosophy,
students of law, students of medicine, and especially, students of
divinity, be humble men. Labour in humility even more than in your
special science. Humility will advance you in your special science;
while, all the time, and at the end of time, she will be more to you than
all the other sciences taken together. And since I have spoken of A
Kempis, take this motto for all your life out of A Kempis, as the great
and good Fenelon did, and it will guide you to the goal: _Ama nescia et
pro nihilo reputari_.
4. But of all the men in the whole world it is ministers who should
simply, as Peter says, be clothed with humility, and that from head to
foot. And, first as divinity students, and then as pastors and
preachers, we who are ministers have advantages and opportunities in this
respect quite peculiar and private to ourselves. For, while other
students are spending their days and their nights on the ancient classics
of Greece and Rome, the student who is to be a minister is buried in the
Psalms, in the Gospels, and in the Epistles. While the student of law is
deep in his commentaries and his cases, the student of divinity is deep
in the study of experimental religion. And while the medical student is
full of the diseases of animals and of men, the theological student is
absorbed in the holiness of the divine nature, and in the plague of the
human heart, and, especially, he is drowned deeper every day in his own.
And he who has begun a curriculum like that and is not already putting on
a humility beyond all other men had better lose no more time, but turn
himself at once to some other way of making his bread. The word of God
and his own heart,--yes; what a sure school of evangelical humility to
every evangelically-minded student is that! And, then, after that, and
all his days, his congregational communion-roll and his visiting-book.
Let no minister who would be found of God clothed and canopied over with
humility ever lose sight of his communion-roll and pastoral visitation-
book. I defy any minister to keep those records always open before him
and yet remain a proud man, a self-respecting, self-satisfied,
self-righteous man. For, what secret histories of his own folly,
neglect, rashness, offensiveness, hot-headedness, self-seeking,
self-pleasing vanity, now puffed up over one man, now cast down and full
of gloom over another, what self-flattery here, and what resentment and
retaliation there; and so on, as only his own eyes and his Divine
Master's eye can read between every diary line. What shame will cover
that minister as with a mantle when he thinks what the Christian ministry
might be made, and then takes home to himself what he has made it! Let
any minister shut himself in with his communion-roll and his visiting-
book before each returning communion season, and there will be one worthy
communicant at least in the congregation: one who will have little
appetite all that week for any other food but the broken Body and the
shed Blood of his Redeemer. But these are professional matters that the
outside world has nothing to do with and would not understand. Only, let
all young men who would have evangelical humility absolutely secured and
sealed to them,--let them come and be ministers. Just as all young men
who would have any satisfaction in life, any sense of work well done and
worthy of reward, any taste of a goal attained and an old age earned, let
them take to anything in all this world but the evangelical pulpit and
its accompanying pastorate.
5. But humility is not a grace of the pulpit and the pastorate only. It
is not those who are separated by the Holy Ghost to study the word of God
and their own hearts all their life long only, who are called to put on
humility. All men are called to that grace. There is no acceptance with
God for any man without that grace. There is no approach to God for any
man without it. All salvation begins and ends in it. Would you, then,
fain possess it? Would you, then, fain attain to it? Then let there be
no mystery and no mistake made about it. Would any man here fain get
down to that deep valley where God's saints walk in the sweet shade and
lie down in green pastures? Well, I warrant him that just before him,
and already under his eye, there is a flight of steps cut in the hill,
which steps, if he will take them, will, step after step, take him also
down to that bottom. The whole face of this steep and slippery world is
sculptured deep with such submissive steps. Indeed, when a man's eyes
are once turned down to that valley, there is nothing to be seen anywhere
in all this world but downward steps. Look whichever way you will, there
gleams out upon you yet another descending stair. Look back at the way
you came up. But take care lest the sight turns you dizzy. Look at any
spot you once crossed on your way up, and, lo! every foot-print of yours
has become a descending step. You sink down as you look, broken down
with shame and with horror and with remorse. There are people, some
still left in this world, and some gone to the other world, people whom
you dare not think of lest you should turn sick and lose hold and hope.
There are places you dare not visit: there are scenes you dare not
recall. Lucifer himself would be a humble angel with his wings over his
face if he had a past like yours, and would often enough return to look
at it. And, then, not the past only, but at this present moment there
are people and things placed close beside you, and kept close beside you,
and you close beside them, on divine purpose just to give you continual
occasion and offered opportunity to practise humility. They are kept
close beside you just on purpose to humiliate you, to cut out your
descending steps, to lend you their hand, and to say to you: Keep near
us. Only keep your eye on us, and we will see you down! And then, if
you are resolute enough to look within, if you are able to keep your eye
on what goes on in your own heart like heart--beats, then, already, I
know where you are. You are under all men's feet. You are ashamed to
lift up your eyes to meet other men's eyes. You dare not take their
honest hands. You could tell Edwards himself things about humiliation
now that would make his terribly searching and humbling book quite tame
and tasteless.
Come, then, O high-minded man, be sane, be wise. If you were up on a
giddy height, and began to see that certain death was straight and soon
before you, what would you do? You know what you would do. You would
look with all your eyes for such steps as would take you safest down to
the solid ground. You would welcome any hand stretched out to help you.
You would be most attentive and most obedient and most thankful to any
one who would assure you that this is the right way down. And you would
keep on saying to yourself--Once I were well down, no man shall see me up
here again. Well, my brethren, humiliation, humility, is to be learned
just in the same way, and it is to be learned in no other way. He who
would be down must just come down. That is all. A step down, and
another step down, and another, and another, and already you are well
down. A humble act done to-day, a humble word spoken to-morrow;
humiliation after humiliation accepted every day that you would at one
time have spurned from you with passion; and then your own vile, hateful,
unbearable heart-all that is ordained of God to bring you down, down to
the dust; and this last, your own heart, will bring you down to the very
depths of hell. And thus, after all your other opportunities and
ordinances of humility are embraced and exhausted, then the plunges, the
depths, the abysses of humility that God will open up in your own heart
will all work in you a meetness for heaven and a ripeness for its glory,
that shall for ever reward you for all that degradation and shame and
self-despair which have been to you the sure way and the only way to
everlasting life.