life of our Lord, what a blessing to our children that writer will be!  For he will make them see and feel just what all that was in which our Lord’s perfect humility consisted, and how His perfect humility fulfilled itself in Him from day to day; up through all His childhood days, school and synagogue days, workshop and holy days, early manhood and mature manhood days; till He was so meek in all His heart and so humble in all His mind that all men were sent to Him to learn their meekness and their humility of Him.  I envy that gifted man the deep delight he will have in his work, and the splendid reward he will have in the love and the debt of all coming generations.  Only, may he be really sent to us, and that soon!  Theodor Keim comes nearest a far-off glimpse of that eminent service of any New Testament scholar I know.  Jeremy Taylor and Thomas Goodwin also, in their own time and in their own way, had occasional inspirations toward this still-waiting treatment of the master-subject of all learning and all genius—­the inward sanctification, the growth in grace, and then the self-discovery of the incarnate Son of God.  But, so let it please God, some contemporary scholar will arise some day soon, combining in himself Goodwin’s incomparable Christology, and Taylor’s incomparable eloquence, and Keim’s incomparably digested learning, with John Bunyan’s incomparable imagination and incomparable English style, and the waiting work will be done, and theology for this life will take on its copestone.  In his absence, and till he comes, let us attempt a few annotations to-night on this so-called shepherd boy’s song in the Valley of Humiliation.

   He that is down, needs fear no fall.

The whole scenery of the surrounding valley is set before us in that single eloquent stanza.  The sweet-voiced boy sits well off the wayside as he sings his song to himself.  He looks up to the hill-tops that hang over his valley, and every shining tooth of those many hill-tops has for him its own evil legend.  He thinks he sees a little heap of bleaching bones just under where that eagle hangs and wheels and screams.  Not one traveller through these perilous parts in a thousand gets down those cruel rocks unhurt; and many travellers have been irrecoverably lost among those deadly rocks, and have never received Christian burial.  All the shepherds’ cottages and all the hostel supper-tables for many miles round are full of terrible stories of the Hill Difficulty and the Descent Dangerous.  And thus it is that this shepherd boy looks up with such fear at those sharp peaks and shining precipices, and lifts his fresh and well-favoured countenance to heaven and sings again:  “He that is down, needs fear no fall.”  Down in his own esteem, that is.  For this is a song of the heart rather than of the highway.  Down—­safe, that is, from the steep and slippery places of self-estimation, self-exaltation, self-satisfaction.  Down—­so as to be delivered from all ambition and emulation