Humility

“And be clothed with humility.” — 1 PETER T. 5.

WE hi s thinking, during Lent, about the duty of being humble. But what a poor thing we make out of humility. What a fiction it is apt to be with us. How artificial we are apt to make it. We reduce it to a few observances. We try to cultivate it from outside. At most we try to school ourselves into certan feelings, making our selves think about certain things until we reach a certain emotional condition, and we call that humility; but humility not as an action, not as a sentiment, but as an abiding character, out of which all actions should flow in one direction, from which all sentiments should rise, cloud-like, with one color, — this we hardly conceive of, and to seek after it hardly enters into our thoughts.

Let us look, then, at humility a little while, and see if we cannot get some deeper and truer notions about what it really is, and where it really comes from. It is not well to use the word, and praise the grace, and yet be all the while mistaking what it is that we name and praise.

The word itself and its history are interesting. “There are cases,” says Coleridge, “in which more knowledge, of more value, may be conveyed by the history of a word than by the history of a campaign.” You can often trace a word down the generations and judge of the character of each period by seeing whether the word was popular or unpopular, whether it was a title of dishonor or of honoi in each successive age; just as, if you could send a great warrior or a great thinker or a great saint, a Csesar or a Bacon or a St. John, from age to age and country to country, and could see how every age and country regarded Him, you would have a test of the character of every land and time. It is true of the careers of the best words, as Jesus said it was to be of the progress of His disciples, that “he that receiveth you receiveth me.” The best and noblest words are really the judges of the people, who pronounce on their own moral condition as they speak them with affection or dislike.

Now take this word humility. It was not a new word when the New Testament was written. It, or its Greek equivalent, was very common. It had been used for years. Only it is striking that almost without exception the word humility, used before the time of Christ, is used contemptuously and rebukingly. It always meant meanness of spirit. To be humble was to be a coward. It described a cringing soul. It was a word of slaves. Such is its almost constant classic use.

Where could we find a more striking instance of the change that the Christian religion brought into the world, than in the way in which it took this disagraceful word and made it honorable. To be humble is to have a low estimation of one’s self. That was considered shameful in the olden time. Nobody claimed it for himself. No body enjoined it upon another. You insulted a man if you called him humble. It seemed to be inconsistent with that self-respect which is necessary to any good activity. Christ came and made the despised quality the crowning grace of the culture that He inaugurated. Lo! the disgraceful word became the key-word of His fullest gospel. He redeemed the quality, and straightway the name became honorable. It became the ambition of all men to wear it. To cal a man humble was to praise him now. Men affected it if they did not have it. Pride began to ape humility when humility was made the crowning grace of human life.

It is in moral changes such as these, in alterations of the standards and aspirations of the race, that the revolutionary power of Christianity is really shown, far more than in external changes, the progress of civilization, the reshaping of empires. Think what the change must have been. Think with what indignation and contempt men of the old school in Rome and Athens must have seen mean-spiritedness, as they called it, taken up, inculcated and honored, proclaimed as the salvation of the world, and Him in whom it was most signally embodied made the Saviour and King of men. Ah, it seems to me more and more that it must have been veiy hard for those early disciples to have believed in Christ.

But let us see, if we can, what the change was that Christianity accomplished, and how it came about. The quality that Christianity rescued and glorified was humility. Humility means a low estimate or value of one’s self. But all values are relative. The estimate we set on anything depends of course on the standard with which we compare it. You cannot tell how big anything is, unless you compare it with something else, and so values are always varying as the standards or the objects with which you compare the thing that you are valuing change. Your boy of twelve plays with his little brothers of three or four, and seems to them a giant and a sage; then he goes and sits among his teachers, and is forth with a child again. Everything depends for its value on the standards with which you compare it. The silver is precious till you find the gold, the gold until you find the diamond.

Now Christianity’s great primary revelation was God. Much about Him it showed men; but first of all it showed them Him. He, the Creator, the Governor, became a presence clear and plain before men’s hearts. His greatness, His holiness, His love, — nay, we cannot describe Him by His qualities, for He is greater than them all, — He, by the marvellous method of the Incarnation, showed himself to man. He stood beside man’s work. He towered above and folded Himself about man’s life. He entered into men’s closets and took possession of men’s hearts. And what then? God in the world must be the standard of the world. Greatness meant some thing different when men had seen how great He was, and the manhood which had compared itself with lesser men and grown proud now had a chance to match itself with God, and to see how small it was and to grow humble about itself.

We are not dealing only with history; we are not talking only about what happened eighteen hundred years ago. A man is living a pagan life here, now, among us. Wherever he goes he meets men whom he measures him self against, and finds that he surpasses them. He is the strongest man in the wrestle of business, the quickest man. at a bargain, the wittiest man at an argument. Now that man cannot be humble. He overtops his little world and he must think himself high. The White Mountains have never seen the Alps, and Mount Washington and Mount Jefferson, looking down on their lower peaks, must think they are the summits of the world. It is strange how small men can make their world, so that the petty supremacy of a school-room or a shop counter is enough to kill out humility. Now, if such a man comes among other men better and greater than himself, he does, perhaps, learn what it is to be humble. Only our pride is very ingenious, and we are very quick to find some point in which the greatest of our superiors is worse off than we are, and to hide our imperilled self-satisfaction there. “Yes,” we say, “he knows a hundred times as much, and is a hundred times as generous as I, but he has not my good taste, or he cannot coin money as I can.” It is wonderful how the smallest man can keep his self-complacency in the presence of the largest. So many of us have some one pet point in which we really believe that we surpass almost every one we meet. But let that small man become a Christian. That means, let the narrow walls of his life be broken down and let him see God, present here by Christ. At once then is all changed. It is as if you took the brown rugged hill and towered up into the sky above it the white, straight, topless alpine mountain. All question of feet and inches disappears, and in the consciousness of its littleness that which had counted itself great does homage to the truly great which it has found. This is the meaning of whatever sense of his own littleness comes into a man’s life when he is made a Christian. I think it is terrible to consider what a fearful thing it would be if the only thing that Christ showed us of God were His greatness. The pure humiliation would be too crushing. Just imagine that when yon and I were going on learning our lessons, doing our work, exercising our skill here on the earth and proud of our knowledge, our strength, and our skill, just suppose that suddenly Omniscience towered up above our knowledge, and Omnipotence above our strength, and the Infinite Wisdom stood piercing out of the sight of our ignorant and baffled skill. Must it not crush the man with an utter insignificance? What is the use of heaving up these mole-hills so laboriously close by the gigantic mountain-side? But if the revelation is not only this; if it includes not only the greatness but the love of God; if the majesty that is shown to us is the majesty of a father, which takes our littleness into its greatness, makes it part of itself, honors it, trains it, does not mock it, then there conies the true graciousness of humility. It is not less humble, but it is not crushed. It is not paralyzed, but stimulated. The energy which the man used to get out of his estimate of his own greatness he gets now out of the sight of His Father’s, which yet is so near to him that, in some finer and higher sense, it still is his; and so he is more hopeful and happy and eager in his humility than he ever used to be in his pride. This is the philosophy of reverence and humility as enrichers of life and main-springs of activity.

There is nothing so bad for man or woman as to live always with their inferiors. It is a truth so important that one might well wish to turn aside a moment and urge it, even in its lower aspects, upon the young people who are just making their associations and friendships. Many a temptation of laziness or pride induces us to draw towards those who do not know as much or are not in some way as strong as we are. It is a smaller tax upon our powers to be in their society. But it is bad for us. I am sure that I have known men, intellectually and morally very strong, the whole development of whose intellectual and moral life has suffered and been dwarfed, because they have only accompanied with their inferiors, because they have not lived with men greater than them selves. Whatever else they lose, they surely must lose some culture of humility. If I could choose a young man’s companions, some should be weaker than himself, that he might learn patience and charity; many should be as nearly as possible his equals, that he might have the full freedom of friendship; but most should be stronger than he was, that he might forever be thinking humbly of himself and be tempted to higher things. And this principle, which is surely the true one in the associations of men with one another, is elevated to its perfect application when we think of man humbled and incited by the constant presence of God manifest both as majesty and love in Christ.

It was not strange that humility should be contemptible as long as and where the presence of God was very little real. The only way for men to be humble then was for them to stoop until they were lower than some thing than which they were made to be taller. But when Christ showed us God, then man had only to stand at his highest and look up to the Infinite above him to see how small he was. And, always, the true way to be humble is not to stoop till you are smaller than yourself, but to stand at your real height against some higher nature that shall show you what the real smallness of your greatest greatness is. The first is the unreal humility that always goes aVout depreciating human nature; the second is the genuine humility that always stands in love and adoration, glorifying God.

2. This is one, then, of the ways in which Christ rescued and exalted humility. He gave man his true standard. He set man’s littleness against the infinite height of God. The next way that I want to speak of is even more remarkable. He asserted and magnified the essential glory of humanity. Remember, always, when you say that Christ convicted man of sin, that, nevertheless, true as that is, there never was any life that so superbly asserted the essential worth of humanity, — showed what a surpassing thing it is to be a man, — like that sin-convicting life of Jesus. He showed us that the human might be joined with the divine. He showed us that from lips of flesh like ours those mighty words, “I and my Father are one,” might issue, and yet the lips not be burned up in uttering them; and more than this, He showed us that the human soul was worth all the mysterious and terrible redemption of the cross. Thus He glorified human nature. And does it seem strange then to say that by this glorification He taught man that it was his true place to be humble? Ah, if a man must be humbled, and is exalted by his humility, when he sees God, surely when he sees the possibility of himself, there is no truer or more exalted feeling for him than to look in on what he is and think it very mean and wretched by the side of what he might be, what his Lord has showed him that he was made for. Christ makes us humble by showing us our design. Again, let me suppose that I can really get close to the proud, self-sufficient master of the state, the shop, the farm. I get his ear in some lull of his noisy work, and I tell him the story of a being whom God loves and treasures. I tell him about powers meant to grapple with eternal things. I describe to him a love that is made to love the loveliest. I open the gates of immortality and show him life opening, brightening forever and forever. I am able to touch the very breast of the Almighty, and lo! the crystal window of revelation opens and the love of God for this wonderful being burns clear within. “God so loved the world!” I tell the story of this being, and then to my good friend, absorbed in the low fret and sin and worry of this world, I say, “This is God’s idea of you.” I drop the curtain of his real life for a moment and let him see God’s purpose! Is he not humbled? What “Thou art the man!” of any Nathan charging him with sin could make his sin seem so wretched to him as this story of himself, written in the bright letters of the Saviour’s Gospel, even in the red letters of the Saviour’s blood? He matches himself against himself and is ashamed. The more he thinks of what he might have been, the less he thinks of what he is. It strips his pride off from him and clothes him with humility.

There is nothing more strange and at the same time more truthful about Christianity, than its combination of humiliation and exaltation for the soul of man. If one wants to prove that man is but a little lower than the angels, the son and heir of God, he must go to the Bible. If he wants to prove how poor and base and satan-like the soul of man can be, still to the Bible he must go. If you want to find the highest ecstasy that man’s spirit ever reached, it is the Christian saint exulting in his God. Do you want to hear the bitterest sorrow that ever wrung this human heart? It is that same Christian saint penitent for his sin. The same faith has built its cathedral spires that pierced the very skies with their triumphant hope, and it has hollowed the hermit’s caves under the ground, as if men could not hide their sinfulness too deep out of the sight of daylight and of God. The exaltation of Christianity seems to get its supremest jubilate out of the depths from which it sprang up into the sky, and its humiliation is all the more profound both for the height from which it fell and for the height to which it may rise again. The world has known no psalms and no lamentations like the Bible’s, and they are parts of the one same book.

If I am speaking directly to the experience of any thoughtful and sensitive person here to-day, I know that he will bear me witness when I say that in this great characteristic of it Christianity is true to all the deepest facts of human life. Have you not learnt, did you not learn very early, that exaltation and abasement do not stand far apart in, do not come singly into, your life? Thoughtless and coarse natures, feeling only the grosser delights and the grosser sorrows, are either all delighted or all sorrowful, and know no mixture of emotions. Either they are all triumphant or entirely discouraged. But as you went farther and came to subtler disciplines of God, have you not known what it was to see your privileges never so clearly as in the light of your imperfections, and your imperfections never so clearly as in the light of your privileges? Just when you saw some dear life pass through the gate into the immortal world, and saw what a bliss and triumph there must be for one to whom that unseen world was real and bright, just then you felt how little you had grasped it, how wedded you were to these things that are mortal and seen. Just when you saw some glimpse of the sweetness and beauty of giving up yourself for others, you found how unwilling you were to sacrifice yourself, how full of selfishness you were. The same light which showed you the heaven that you were made for has always showed you the rock that you were chained to; as the same word of Jesus which showed the young nobleman the treasures in heaven brought back before his mind the treasures on earth from which he could not tear himself away. This makes the sacredness and awfulness of life when we come to know it, that wo are never so near our highest as when we are most sen sible of the danger of our lowest, and the danger of the lowest is never so real to us as when the splendor of the highest stands wide open.

I think we cannot but see the beauty of a humility like this if it once becomes the ruling power of a changed man’s life, this humility born of the sight of a man’s pos sible self. It has in it all that is good in the best self-respect. Nay, with reference to the whole subject of self-respect this seems to be true, that the only salvation from an admiration of our own present condition, which is pride, is to be found in a profound respect for the best possibility and plan of our being, which involves humility. Ask yourself. You are dealing, say, with one of the proud, successful men of whom our land is full, — a man successful in some one of the low and sordid planes of effort in which men are forever struggling. He is proud of his smartness, proud of his sharp, hard, unscrupulousness. Suppose you had, for instance, the mere successful politician of the day. The man admires himself. To him there is nothing in all the world conceivable so fine and complete as the sort of life that he is living. That is his vulgar pride. Will you make that man humble? You may hold up before him the most shining characters the world has ever seen. Marshal the white, unstained names before him and they do not abash him. He easily counts them his inferiors. You never can abash him till in some way he becomes conscious of a purer, honester, and nobler self. Never until by some shock or other his life is broken and he sees what he might have been, sees what he might be. In some stillness of the night when a better nature is called out by God, and a man whom he recognizes as himself and yet who shames the self that lived his yesterday, stands visible before him, — then he is humbled. In some revival meeting when a picture of heaven or a picture of hell, painted with graphic earnestness, reaches him and lets him see that this soul of his which he has kept truckling for dollars or for offices is capable of heaven and capable of hell, when the dignity of his responsibility is set before him, then he is humbled.

Let us be sure that there is, laid up in the heart of God, an image and a thought of each of us, which if we could see it would shame and humble us. We go on our way, we sin and rejoice in sinning, we love low things, we starve our souls or we pollute them, we wade through mire and grovel in idleness; but all the while there lies God’s thought of us, before which if we saw it we must be ashamed. The Christian pilgrims to the Jordan are baptized there sometimes in a pure white robe, which then is laid by to be used again for the purpose of their burial. They are to be wrapped in it again when they are dead. After all the sins and miseries and vicissitudes of earth are over, they must come back at last and meet that symbol of the purity with which they started their new life. And often, with that robe laid up at home, they must stop in the midst of some foul passage of their life, and remember how white it is, and be humiliated. So it is the sight of what God meant us to be that makes us ashamed of what we are. And it is the death of Christ for us, the preciousness that He saw in our souls making them worthy of that awful sacrifice, it is that which lets us see our own soul as He sees it in its possibility, and so lets us see it in its reality as he sees it too and put our pride away and be humble.

I have spoken of the way in which Christianity sets a man humbly before God and humbly before himself. The name humility is perhaps more generally, at least as often, used to describe an attitude which a man takes before his fellow-men; and about that I should like to say something next, because it seems to me that is often misconceived. What is it to be humble or to have a low estimate of ourselves before one another? Is it any such unreasonable demand as this, that every man should really think that he is worse, wickeder, duller than every one of his fellows whom he meets? The moment that we state such an idea we see its impossibility. It confuses all moral distinctions, and shuts our eyes to facts. Are we bound then only to be humble before those whom we do cordially recognize as wiser and better than our selves? That sets us at once to most invidious discriminations. No, the wisest and best man is to be humbled before the lowest and most degraded of his brethren; but yet he is not to make believe to himself that he is m higher and better than his poor brother, he is not to disown the good work that God has done for him. In what must his humility consist, then? In two things. The first will be the clear perception that it is God that has made him to differ from the poor creature before him; that except for God’s help he must have been as bad as that. The sight of the poor wretch must make him feel again the tug of that rope of dependence which binds him to God, and which is all that keeps him out of the pit. So in the first place he is humbled before his fellow-man, because the sight of his fellow-man renews his humility before God. And the second thing will be this. The true Christian sees all the children of his Father worthy of that Father’s love. All that he knows about his nature, he knows also about theirs. They, too, have souls, dumb, blind, it may be, but still worthy of the Father’s love. For them, too, Christ has died. This is the sublime revelation of his faith about his fellows. And when he sees them thus, he sees the true use of these powers, of all this life that God has given him. To serve this hidden life of all his brethren, to help it out into some sort of consciousness and action, this is the object to which he wants to dedicate his saved soul, to the salvation of the souls of others. And this is his humility. Honor your own life as much as you will, only see in the lives of other men a value and essential dignity that makes them worthy of your giving yourself up to their help and culture, and then you are the humble man. If you believe with all your heart that there is nothing in you too good to be employed in the divine work of helping some lost child of God back to the Fa ther, then you have really learnt the humility of Christ. Do you remember Him? The supper was ended, and strangely on that solemn night the disciples had fallen into an untimely quarrel which of them should be the greatest, and then the Lord Himself rose from the table and tied the towel round His waist, and went from one wondering disciple to another and washed the feet of all. And then He interpreted His own parable: “If I, your Lord and Master, have washed your feet, ye ought also to wash one another’s feet.” Did Jesus compare Himself with each of those disciples, and own Himself the inferior of each? He only said by His exquisite action that there was something in every one of them, in serving which even His divinity found no inappropriate employment. It was the truth of His whole Incarnation wrought into a homely picture. And the humility of Christ’s disciples, as He said, is one in nature with His own. The delicate woman for very love of Christ nursing Christ’s lowest brethren in the most dreadful wards of the hospital;

the brave missionary living his squalid life among the Indians in their wigwams; the mother giving her life for the child the Lord has given her; what is the power in them all but this, the certainty that every one of Christ’s brethren is worthy of the consecration of the very best that Christ’s disciple has to give? Does that seem hard for you to believe? Have you grown weary of looking for any signs of promise in this dull mass of fellow-men and withdrawn yourself into some luxury of self-culture, feeling as if what you had and were was too good to be wasted upon such creatures as these sick and poor and ignorant? You must be rescued from this proud conceit, not simply by counting yourself lower, but by valuing more highly the spiritual natures of these fellow-men. You must value them as He valued them, who gave His life for them, before you can be as humble in their pres~ ence as He was; and that can come only by making yourself their servant. Only he who puts on the garment of humility finds how worthily it clothes his life. Only he who dedicates himself to the spiritual service of his brethren, simply because his Master tells him they are worth it, comes to know how rich those natures of his brethren are, how richly they are worth the total giving of himself to them.

This seems to me to be the ever-increasing joy of the minister’s life, if one may venture for once to speak of his own work. A man becomes a minister because God says, “Go speak in the temple the words of this life.” He begins the service of his fellow-men in pure obedience to God’s command, but the joy and ever-richening delight of the minister’s work is in finding how deep this human soul to which his Lord has sent him really is. The nature to which he ministers, as he meets its exhibitions here and there, is always amazing him with its spiritual capacity, is always proving itself capable and worthy of so much better and higher ministry than he can give it. So the minister of the Gospel finds his own humility and the delightfulness of his work ever increasing together.

And this suggests one other point, which is the last that I shall speak of. I cannot but think that one of the truest ways in which Christianity has made humility at once a commoner and a nobler grace has been in the way in which it has furnished work for the higher powers of man, which used to be idle and only ponder proudly on themselves. Idleness standing in the midst of unattempted tasks is always proud. Work is always tending to humility. Work touches the keys of endless activity, opens the infinite, and stands awe-struck before the immensity of what there is to do. Work brings a man into the good realm of facts. Work takes the dreamy youth who is growing proud in his closet over one or two sprouting powers which he has discovered in himself, and sets him out among the gigantic needs and the vast processes of the world, and makes him feel his littleness. Work opens the measureless fields of knowledge and skill that reach far out of our sight. I am sure we all know the fine, calm, sober humbleness of men who have really tried themselves against the tasks of life. It was great in Paul, and in Luther, and in Cromwell. It is some thing that never comes into the character, never shows in the face of a man who has never worked. Is not this what you would do for a boy whom you saw getting proud, — aet him to work? He might be so poor of stuff that he would be proud of his work, poorly as he would do it. For the matter of that, men of poor stuff may be proud of anything, proud even of what they call their humility. But if he were really great enough to be humble at all, his work would bring him to humility. He would be brought face to face with facts. He would measure himself against the eternal pillars of the universe. He would learn the blessed lesson of his own littleness in the way in which it is always learnt most blessedly, by learning the largeness of larger things. And all this, which the ordinary occupations of life do for our ordinary powers, Christianity, with the work that it furnishes for our affections and our hopes, does for the higher parts of us.

It is so easy for us to go through the motions of humility. It is — I will not say so hard — but it is so serious and so great a thing to be really humble. I have tried to show it to you as the consummate Christian grace; nay, rather as the star in the zenith, where all the sweep of Christian graces meets. Do you not see that it takes a whole Christian to be wholly humble? Christ came and plucked out of the depths of men’s contempt this perfect quality and set it on the very summit of the hill of grace. I have tried to show you how He did it. He set men close to God, to their true selves, to the souls of their brethren, to the immensity of duty; and He said to them there, what there they understood, “Be humble!”

It was as if He took a proud, fretful man out of the worrying life of the selfish city and set him among the solemn mountains, and the mountains brought to him the blessed peace of humility and the sense of his own insignificance.

It seems to come to this, that Christianity is the religion of the broadest truthfulness. It does not set men at any work of mere resolution, saying, “Come, now, let us be humble.” That would but multiply the endless specimens of useless self-mortification. But true Christianity puts men face to face with the humbling facts, the great realities, and then humility comes upon the soul, as darkness comes on the face of the earth, not because the earth has made up its mind to be dark, but because it has rolled into the great shadow.

It is the narrowness of our life that makes us proud. I should think one of you merchants would be proud of his successful business if he saw nothing beyond it. I should think you men and women would be proud of your splendid houses if you look no farther. But if you could only see God forever present in your life, and Jesus dying for your soul, and your soul worth Jesus’ dying for, and the souls of your brethren precious in His sight, and the whole universe teeming with work for Him, then must come the humility of the Christian. To that humility let us devote ourselves, for in a humility like that alone is peace.