I am content with what I have,
      Little be it, or much: 
   And, Lord, contentment still I crave,
      Because thou savest such.

The only thing this sweet singer is discontented with is his own contentment.  He will not be content as long as he has a shadow of discontent left in his heart.  And how blessed is such holy discontent!  For, would you know, asks Law, who is the greatest saint in all the world?  Well, it is not he who prays most or fasts most; it is not he who gives most alms or is most eminent for temperance, chastity, or justice.  But it is he who is always thankful to God, who wills everything that God willeth, who receives everything as an instance of God’s goodness, and has a heart always ready to praise God for it.  “Perhaps the shepherd’s boy,” says Thomas Scott, “may refer to the obscure and quiet stations of some pastors over small congregations, who live almost unknown to their brethren, but are in a measure useful and very comfortable.”  Perhaps he does.  And, whether he does or no, at any rate such a song will suit some of our brethren very well as they go about among their few and far-off flocks.  They are not church leaders or popular preachers.  There is not much rattling with coaches or rumbling with wheels at their church door.  But, then, methinks, they have their compensation.  They are without much molestation.  They can be all the more thinking what they are, whence they came, and to what their King has called them.  Let them be happy in their shut-in valleys.  For I will dare to say that they wear more of that herb called Heart’s-ease in their bosom than those ministers do they are sometimes tempted to emulate.  I will add in this place that to the men who live and trace these grounds the Lord hath left a yearly revenue to be faithfully paid them at certain seasons for their maintenance by the way, and for their further encouragement to go on in their pilgrimage.

   Here little, and hereafter bliss,
   Is best from age to age.

But, now, from the shepherd boy and from his valley and his song, let us go on without any more poetry or parable to look our own selves full in the face and to ask our own hearts whether they are the hearts of really humble-minded and New Testament men or no.  Dr. Newman, “that subtle, devout man,” as Dr. Duncan calls him, says that “humility is one of the most difficult of virtues both to attain and to ascertain.  It lies,” he says, “close upon the heart itself, and its tests are exceedingly delicate and subtle.  Its counterfeits abound.”  Most true.  And yet humility is not intended for experts in morals only, or for men of a rare religious genius only.  The plainest of men, the least skilled and the most unlettered of men, may not only excel in humility, but may also be permitted to know that they are indeed planted, and are growing slowly but surely in that grace of all graces.  No doubt our Lord had, so to describe it, the most delicate