Too long as I have kept you in this valley to-night, I dare not let you out of it till I have shared with you a few sentences on evangelical humiliation out of that other so subtle and devout man, Jonathan Edwards.  But what special kind of humiliation is evangelical humiliation? you will ask.  Hear, then, what this master in Israel says.  “Evangelical humiliation is the sense that a Christian man has of his own utter insufficiency, utter despicableness, and utter odiousness; with an always answerable frame of heart.  This humiliation is peculiar to the true saints.  It arises from the special influence of the Spirit of God implanting and exercising supernatural and divine principles; and it is accompanied with a sense of the transcendent beauty of divine things.  And, thus, God’s true saints all more or less see their own odiousness on account of sin, and the exceedingly hateful nature of all sin.  The very essence of evangelical humiliation consists in such humility as becomes a man in himself exceeding sinful but now under a dispensation of grace.  It consists in a mean esteem of himself, as in himself nothing, and altogether contemptible and odious.  This, indeed, is the greatest and the most essential thing in true religion.”  And so on through a whole chapter of beaten gold.  To which noble chapter I shall only add that such teaching is as sweet, as strengthening, and as reassuring to the truly Christian heart as it is bitter and hateful to the counterfeit heart.

OLD HONEST

   “An honest heart.”—­Our Lord.

   Next tell them of Old Honest, who you found
   With his white hairs treading the pilgrim’s ground;
   Yea, tell them how plain-hearted this man was,
   How after his good Lord he bare his cross: 
   Perhaps with some grey head this may prevail,
   With Christ to fall in love, and sin bewail.

You would have said that no pilgrim to the Celestial City could possibly have come from a worse place, or a more unlikely place, than was that place from which Christian and Christiana and Matthew and Mercy had come.  And yet so it was.  For Old Honest, this most excellent and every way most delightful old saint, hailed from a far less likely place than even the City of Destruction.  For he came, this rare old soul, of all places in the world, from the Town of Stupidity.  So he tells us himself.  And, partly to explain to us the humiliating name of his native town, and partly to exhibit himself as a wonder to many, the frank old gentleman goes on to tell us that his birthplace actually lies four degrees further away from the sun than does the far-enough away City of Destruction itself.  So that you see this grey-haired saint is all that he always said he was—­a living witness to the fact that his Lord is able to save to the uttermost, and to gather in His Father’s elect from the utmost corner of the land.  Men are mountains of ice