CHAPTER XX—­MR. HUMBLE THE JURYMAN, AND MISS HUMBLE-MIND THE SERVANT-MAID

   ’Learn of Me, for I am meek and lowly in heart.’—­Our Lord.

   ’Be clothed with humility.’—­Peter.

   ’God’s chiefest saints are the least in their own eyes.’—­A Kempis.

   ’Without humility all our other virtues are but vices.’—­Pascal.

   ’Humility does not consist in having a worse opinion of ourselves than
   we deserve.’—­Law.

   ’Humility lies close upon the heart, and its tests are exceedingly
   delicate and subtle.’—­Newman.

Our familiar English word ‘humility’ comes down to us from the Latin root humus, which means the earth or the ground.  Humility, therefore, is that in the mind and in the heart of a man which is low down even to the very earth.  A humble-minded man may not have learning enough to know the etymology of the name which best describes his character, but the divine nature which is in him teaches him to look down, to walk meekly and softly, and to speak seldom, and always in love.  For humility, while it takes its lowly name from earth, all the time has its true nature from heaven.  Humility is full of all meekness, modesty, submissiveness, teachableness, sense of inability, sense of unworthiness, sense of ill-desert.  Till, with that new depth and new intensity that the Scriptures and religious experience have given to this word, as to so many other words, humility, in the vocabulary of the spiritual life, has come to be applied to that low estimate of ourselves which we come to form and to entertain as we are more and more enlightened about God and about ourselves; about the majesty, glory, holiness, beauty, and blessedness of the divine nature, and about our own unspeakable evil, vileness, and misery as sinners.  And, till humility has come to rank in Holy Scripture, and in the lives and devotions of all God’s saints, as at once the deepest root and the ripest fruit of all the divine graces that enter into, and, indeed, constitute the life of God in the heart of man.  Humility, evangelical humility, sings Edwards in his superb and seraphic poem the Religious Affections,—­evangelical humility is the sense that the true Christian has of his own utter insufficiency, despicableness, and odiousness, a sense which is peculiar to the true saint.  But to compensate the true saint for this sight and sense of himself, he has revealed to him an accompanying sense of the absolutely transcendent beauty of the divine nature and of all divine things; a sight and a sense that quite overcome the heart and change to holiness all the dispositions and inclinations and affections of the heart.  The essence of evangelical humility, says Edwards, consists in such humility as becomes a creature in himself exceeding sinful, but at the same time, under a dispensation of grace, and this is the greatest and most essential thing in all true religion.