those memorable words, “Ye call me Lord and Master, and ye say well, for so I am.  If I then, your Lord and Master, wash your feet, how much more ought ye to wash one another’s feet?” Under which expression of washing the feet is included all that subjection, assistance, love, and duty, which every good Christian ought to pay his brother, in whatever station God hath placed him.  For the greatest prince and the meanest slave are not, by infinite degrees, so distant as our Saviour and those disciples, whose feet He vouchsafed to wash.

And although this doctrine of subjecting ourselves to one another may seem to grate upon the pride and vanity of mankind, and may therefore be hard to be digested by those who value themselves upon their greatness or their wealth, yet it is really no more than what most men practise upon other occasions.  For if our neighbour, who is our inferior, comes to see us, we rise to receive him; we place him above us, and respect him as if he were better than ourselves; and this is thought both decent and necessary, and is usually called good manners.  Now the duty required by the Apostle is only that we should enlarge our minds, and that what we thus practise in the common course of life we should imitate in all our actions and proceedings whatsoever; since our Saviour tells us that every man is our neighbour, and since we are so ready, in point of civility, to yield to others in our own houses, where only we have any title to govern.

Having thus shown you what sort of subjection it is which all men owe one another, and in what manner it ought to be paid, I shall now draw some observations from what hath been said.

And first, a thorough practice of this duty of subjecting ourselves to the wants and infirmities of each other would utterly extinguish in us the vice of pride.

For if God has pleased to intrust me with a talent, not for my own sake, but for the service of others, and at the same time hath left me full of wants and necessities which others must supply, I can then have no cause to set any extraordinary value upon myself, or to despise my brother because he hath not the same talents which were lent to me.  His being may probably be as useful to the public as mine; and therefore, by the rules of right reason, I am in no sort preferable to him.

Secondly, It is very manifest, from what has been said, that no man ought to look upon the advantages of life, such as riches, honour, power, and the like, as his property, but merely as a trust which God hath deposited with him to be employed for the use of his brethren, and God will certainly punish the breach of that trust, though the laws of man will not, or rather indeed cannot; because the trust was conferred only by God, who has not left it to any power on earth to decide infallibly whether a man makes a good use of his talents or not, or to punish him where he fails.  And therefore God seems to have more particularly