'Learn of Me, for I am meek and lowly in heart.' - Our Lord.
Devotions, the Serious Call, the Christian Perfection, the Religious
Affections, and such like.
All that, and you still unqualified! All that, and your eyes still dry!
Chapter 20 - MR. HUMBLE THE JURYMAN, AND MISS HUMBLEMIND
THE SERVANT-MAID
'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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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