Come, then, O high-minded man, be sane, be wise.  If you were up on a giddy height, and began to see that certain death was straight and soon before you, what would you do?  You know what you would do.  You would look with all your eyes for such steps as would take you safest down to the solid ground.  You would welcome any hand stretched out to help you.  You would be most attentive and most obedient and most thankful to any one who would assure you that this is the right way down.  And you would keep on saying to yourself—­Once I were well down, no man shall see me up here again.  Well, my brethren, humiliation, humility, is to be learned just in the same way, and it is to be learned in no other way.  He who would be down must just come down.  That is all.  A step down, and another step down, and another, and another, and already you are well down.  A humble act done to-day, a humble word spoken to-morrow; humiliation after humiliation accepted every day that you would at one time have spurned from you with passion; and then your own vile, hateful, unbearable heart-all that is ordained of God to bring you down, down to the dust; and this last, your own heart, will bring you down to the very depths of hell.  And thus, after all your other opportunities and ordinances of humility are embraced and exhausted, then the plunges, the depths, the abysses of humility that God will open up in your own heart will all work in you a meetness for heaven and a ripeness for its glory, that shall for ever reward you for all that degradation and shame and self-despair which have been to you the sure way and the only way to everlasting life.

CHAPTER XXI—­MASTER THINK-WELL, THE LATE AND ONLY SON OF OLD MR. MEDITATION

   ’As he thinketh in his heart, so is he.’—­A Proverb.

It was a truly delightful sight to see old Mr. Meditation and his only son, our little Think-well, out among the woods and hedgerows of a summer afternoon.  Little Think-well was the son of his father’s old age.  That dry tree used to say to himself that if ever he was intrusted with a son of his own, he would make his son his most constant and his most confidential companion all his days.  And so he did.  The eleventh of Deuteronomy had become a greater and greater text to that childless man as he passed the mid-time of his days.  ‘Therefore,’ he used to say to himself, as he walked abroad alone, and as other men passed him with their children at their side—­’Therefore ye shall teach them to your children, speaking of them when thou sittest in thine house, and when thou walkest by the way, when thou liest down and when thou risest up.  And thou shalt write them upon the doorposts of thine house and upon thy gates.’  And thus it was that, as the little lad grew up, there was no day of all the seven that he so much numbered and waited for as was that sacred day on which his father was free to take little Think-well by the hand and lead