only seem fanatical absurdity.  And yet, perhaps, if we fairly take into account how the seeking after personal advancement and conspicuous work festers the soul, and how the flower of heart’s-ease grows, as Bunyan’s shepherd-boy found out, in the lowly valley, these exhortations to a quiet performance of lowly duties and a contented filling of lowly spheres, may seem touched with a higher wisdom than is to be found in the arenas where men trample over each other in their pursuit of a fame ’which appeareth for a little time, and then vanisheth away.’  What a peaceful world it would be, and what peaceful souls they would have, if Christian people really adopted as their own these two simple maxims.  They are easy to understand, but how hard they are to follow.

It needs scarcely be noted that the temper condemned here destroys all the concord and amity which the Apostle has been urging in the previous clause.  Where every man is eagerly seeking to force himself in front of his neighbour, any community will become a struggling mob; and they who are trying to outrun one another and who grasp at ‘high things,’ will never be ‘of the same mind one toward another.’  But, we may observe that the surest way to keep in check the natural selfish tendency to desire conspicuous things for ourselves is honestly, and with rigid self-control, to let ourselves be carried away by enthusiasm for humble tasks.  If we would not disturb our lives and fret our hearts by ambitions that, even when gratified, bring no satisfaction, we must yield ourselves to the impulse of the continuous stream of lowly duties which runs through every life.

But, plainly as this exhortation is needful, it is too heavy a strain to be ever carried out except by the power of Christ formed in the heart.  It is in His earthly life that we find the great example of the highest stooping to the lowest duties, and elevating them by taking them upon Himself.  He did not ’strive nor cry, nor cause His voice to be heard in the streets.’  Thirty years of that perfect life were spent in a little village folded away in the Galilean hills, with rude peasants for the only spectators, and the narrow sphere of a carpenter’s shop for its theatre.  For the rest, the publicity possible would have been obscurity to an ambitious soul.  To speak comforting words to a few weeping hearts; to lay His hands on a few sick folk and heal them; to go about in a despised land doing good, loved indeed by outcasts and sinners, unknown by all the dispensers of renown, and consciously despised by all whom the world honoured—­that was the perfect life of the Incarnate God.  And that is an example which His followers seem with one consent to set aside in their eager race after distinction and work that may glorify their names.  The difficulty of a faithful following of these precepts, and the only means by which that difficulty can be overcome, are touchingly taught us in another of Paul’s Epistles by the accumulation of motives which he brings