If you know yourself, you will answer—­Pride; Selfishness, Ambition.  As you look back upon the past years of your life, is it not true that its unhappiness has chiefly come from the succession of personal mortifications and almost trivial disappointments which the intercourse of life has brought you?  Great trials come at lengthened intervals, and we rise to breast them; but it is the petty friction of our every-day life with one another, the jar of business or of work, the discord of the domestic circle, the collapse of our ambition, the crossing of our will or the taking down of our conceit, which make inward peace impossible.  Wounded vanity, then, disappointed hopes, unsatisfied selfishness—­these are the old, vulgar, universal

          SOURCES OF MAN’S UNREST.

Now it is obvious why Christ pointed out as the two chief objects for attainment the exact opposites of these.  To meekness and lowliness these things simply do not exist.  They cure unrest by making it impossible.  These remedies do not trifle with surface symptoms; they strike at once at removing causes.  The ceaseless chagrin of a self-centered life can be removed at once by learning meekness and lowliness of heart.  He who learns them is forever proof against it.  He lives henceforth a charmed life.  Christianity is a fine inoculation, a transfusion of healthy blood into an anaemic or poisoned soul.  No fever can attack a perfectly sound body; no fever of unrest can disturb a soul which has breathed the air or learned the ways of Christ.

Men sigh for the wings of a dove that they may fly away and be at Rest.  But flying away will not help us.  “The Kingdom of God is within you.”  We aspire to the top to look for Rest; it lies at the bottom.  Water rests only when it gets to the lowest place.  So do men.  Hence, be lowly.  The man who has no opinion of himself at all can never be hurt if others do not acknowledge him.  Hence, be meek.  He who is without expectation cannot fret if nothing comes to him.  It is self-evident that these things are so.  The lowly man and the meek man are really above all other men, above all other things.  They dominate the world because they do not care for it.  The miser does not possess gold, gold possesses him.  But the meek possess it.  “The meek,” said Christ, “inherit the earth.”  They do not buy it; they do not conquer it; but they inherit it.

There are people who go about the world looking out for slights, and they are necessarily miserable, for they find them at every turn—­especially the imaginary ones.  One has the same pity for such men as for the very poor.  They are the morally illiterate.  They have had no real education, for they have never learned

          HOW TO LIVE.

Few men know how to live.  We grow up at random carrying into mature life the merely animal methods and motives which we had as little children.  And it does not occur to us that all this must be changed; that much of it must be reversed; that life is the finest of the Fine Arts; that it has to be learned with lifelong patience, and that the years of our pilgrimage are all too short to master it triumphantly.