"I Kept a Private Fast for the Conquest of My Pride"

ara N 1642 they kept real fast days. On t occasion they denied themselves meat and drink and sleep and recreation, and gave themselves up to meditation on divine things, and to self-examination, and to public worship, and to private prayer. And Thomas Shepard was a true seventeenth-century Puritan in the way he laid out his whole life for the salvation of his soul, For these are his very identical words written in a small manuscript book that little did he think would be opened and read with such great honour and such great love in the city of the Scottish Covenants in the year of his risen Lord Nineteen Hundred and Nine. ‘These are some of his then secretly-written but now openlyread words about himself: ‘ November 10, 1642. — I kept a private fast for light to see the full glory of the Gospel, and for an infused faith, and for a spirit of prayer, and for the conquest of all my remaining pride of heart.’ This deep-hearted and many-sided man had more things than one in his mind when he set himself to keep his private fasts. But he had nothing that was more in his mind than his own proud and unhumbled heart.

Now to begin with, you must all know quite well what pride is and what a proud heart is. It is pride and it is a proud heart to have high thoughts about yourselves. It is to have high thoughts about your great worth as compared with the worth of all other men. It is to have high thoughts about your rights and about your titles and about your highly deserved honours and rewards. It is to go about carrying your head high and laying all other men’s heads low. It is to be haughty and scornful and arrogant and domineering. It is to speak and to expect that all other men shall be silent. It is to be so swollen in your souls that you can brook no rival near your throne. In a word it is to be as like the devil himself as a mortal man can be. For a proud heart is understood to have been that fallen angel’s one besetting sin according to the Hebrew prophet’s apostrophe directed down to him which runs thus: ‘ How art thou fallen from heaven, O Lucifer, son of the morning! For thou didst say in thine heart, I will ascend into the highest heaven. I will exalt my throne above all the other stars of God. I will be like the Most High Himself. And the greatest, but at the same time the most humble-minded of all the apostles, warns a young and a gifted minister to take good heed lest, being lifted up with pride, he fall into the same condemnation with the devil.

I think I will put this lesson in the very forefront of all our lessons this evening: this painful lesson concerning the immense losses that we all suffer because of the pride of our heart. Our immense losses that is in self-knowledge and in self-improvement. We are all full of faults that our best friends simply dare not venture to point out to us, such. is the pride of our heart. Our very best friends and our very wisest well-wishers cannot run the risk that is involved in telling us the simple truth about ourselves. We would so turn upon them if they did. We would so strike back at them if they did. We would so remember it against them. We would never forgive them. We, all of us, have fatal faults that all men see and speak about behind our back, but our very best friend has not dared as yet to tell us one of our faults to our face. In all my own acquaintance I only know one man to whom I can be bold to tell to his face all the things that you tell to one another behind his back. And, would you believe it? instead of resenting my boldness with him, that saintly man only loves and trusts me all the more. Have you any such saintly man as that in all your circle? But far more to the point, are you such a saintly man yourself? If not, fast from your pride till you are.

So sadly true is all this that, if you would live in family love and in domestic peace with a proud-hearted man, you must never venture to instruct him in anything, nor to correct him in anything, nor to cross him in anything, and especially, you must take good care not to do anything of that sort in the presence of other people. One day when old Mr. Shepard was out visiting his congregation he went on their warm invitation to take tea with a happy pair he had married to one another just the week before. In the exuberance of his honeymoon the gushing young husband was pouring out all the talk on all the topics that came up in the conversation. When at one point his gentle wife with all her sweetness quietly corrected him in something in which he was quite wrong. She should not have done it. For she had no sooner done it, than her husband turned on her and gave her such a look and such an answer as made Shepard shiver to his bones.

As I read the scene in Shepard’s diary of that day I remembered the brave-hearted bride who said, ‘ No, sir!’ when the officiating minister asked her if she would have this man who stood beside her to be her husband. ‘No, sir!’ she said and walked out of the astounded church and back to her mother’s house. She had been a few minutes too late in arriving at the church door; and in the offended pride and the hot anger of his heart her bridegroom had given her such a look and had hurled at her such a word as I shall not here repeat. And thus it was that with a flash of sure foresight down the coming years she lifted her head nobly before the overawed congregation and said, ‘ No, sir!’ and thus escaped just in time from a life of cruel bondage to a man with a proud heart and a bad temper and a bitter tongue. ‘No, sir!’ she said, and went away back to her old home a free woman. Again I say to you, and Thomas Shepard bids me say it to you out of his own experience, that if you would live in domestic peace with most men you must never know anything better than they know it, nor must you speak till they have spoken. And when they have spoken you must always admire and applaud what they say. As the apostle also has it — the wife see that she reverence her husband.

Let us take our next illustration of a proud heart from public life, but not from the public life of the present day. In Dr. Newman’s Apologia a story is told by him, and with great approval, about a certain saint called Alphonso, who began life at the Italian bar but ended his life in a Roman monastery. On one occasion in the pursuit of his professional duties Alphonso was betrayed into what seemed to many to be an act of deceit, though as a matter of fact it was only an intellectual mistake he had made in getting up his case, and that was the occasion of his leaving public life and embracing what is called the ‘ religious life” All his friends tried to quiet and console him by assuring him that such mistakes were not uncommon even among the best men at the bar. But so crushed was the young advocate’s proud heart that he would listen to nothing that any one could say to him. But with his head sunk on his breast he said, ‘Vain world! I know you no more! Courts of law, never shall you see me again!’ And turning his back on the scene of his humiliation he withdrew to his own house saying aloud all the way, ‘Vain, vain world! I know all your vanity now.’ The people in Rome who settle these things may canonise that man and call him a saint, and for my part I hope he was; but that was very far from being a saintly step that he took. A true saint would have fasted from his pride, and would have returned to his post, and would have been all the more commanding in his eloquence and all the more successful in his cases that he was more and more from that day clothed with modesty and with humility. It was not his saintliness, as Dr. Newman would have us believe, that turned Alphonso away from the work of his life; it was his all-consuming self-esteem. It was his sinful pride and not his saintly humility that made Alphonso a monk.

We need not bid, for cloistered cell,
Our neighbours or our work farewell,
Nor strive to wind ourselves too high
For sinful man beneath the sky:

The trivial round, the common task,
Will furnish all we need to ask, — Room to deny ourselves, a road

To bring us daily nearer God.

But I cannot cast much of a stone at runaway Alphonso. And that because I have sometimes been very near doing the same thing myself. When a Scottish minister makes a great breakdown because of his laziness, or because of his bad temper, or because of his want of common sense, he does not have a monastery into which to make his escape. No. But there are new vacancies announced every day in some one of which he may hope to get a hearing, and perhaps a call, and so be able to flee the scene of his many mistakes and his great humiliations. O no, my brother, do not do it! Remain where you are and face it out. Stand to your post and play the man. Continue to live on in the same manse in which you and your young wife were once so happy. And, God helping you, go out and in among your present people adorning every week-day your Sabbath-day doctrines of repentance and reformation. And your humble-minded retrieval of your past errors, and your universally recognised reformation for the future, will impress and will instruct your people far more than all your early blamelessness of life and devotedness to duty ever did. God saves the meek. I was brought low. He did me help afford.

Among all your public and private fasts for the conquest of your pride, do any of you ever fast from self-excusing, and self-defending, and self-asserting? We have already taken a great lesson from the life of a Roman Catholic saint, let us humble ourselves to take another lesson from another such saint, and a far better. ‘It is a mark,’ she says, ‘of the deepest and the truest humility to see ourselves blamed and censured and condemned without a due cause, and still to be silent under that great wrong. It is a very noble imitation of our Lord to be so silent. For myself, she says, ‘I could never make trial of this so Christian grace in any matter of much consequence, because I never heard of any one speaking ill of me that I did not see how far short he fell of the full truth. For if he was quite wrong in his present particulars, I had offended God much more in other matters that my detractor knew nothing about. And methought God favoured me much in not having my worst sins proclaimed before all the world. And thus I am always very glad that my slanderers should tell a trifling lie about me rather than the whole terrible truth. Now, if any of you are as much ‘trysted with fault-finders’ as Thomas Shepard and Santa Teresa were, you might try their private fast from self-defending and from self-excusing and see how it would turn out.

In the Scriptures and in the best old divinity all true fasting is always accompanied with much true prayer. And there is nothing you can do that is so certain to kill out all the remaining pride of your heart as true prayer united with true fasting; true heart-searching, heart-breaking, heart-outpouring prayer. ‘When Ouranius first entered into holy orders he had a great haughtiness in his temper and a great contempt and scorn for all foolish and unreasonable people. But he has prayed away that proud spirit till he has now the greatest patience and tenderness even for the most obstinate sinners. The rudeness or the ill-nature or the evil tongues of any of his people used at first to betray him into retaliation, but now all these things raise no other passion in him than more prayer in their behalf. Thus have his prayers for other men, as well as for himself, altered and amended his whole heart. This secret life of prayer of his enlightens his mind, and softens his heart, and sweetens his temper, and make everything he says and does to be instructive and impressive and amiable and affecting.’ And so on to the end of his splendidlypainted portrait. And not Ouranius only. But the same life of true prayer — heart-searching, sin-confessing and intercessory prayer — will soften and will cleanse the rudest and the most ill-natured of men among you. Pray far more, my brethren. And the things you will have to confess about yourselves every day will soon show you that pride was not made for such sinners as you are. Yes, true and unceasing prayer is guaranteed gradually to kill out all your remaining pride. ‘True and unceasing prayer will end in making the proudest man among you as meek as was Moses himself: aye, as meek and as lowly in heart as was Jesus Christ Himself.

That being so, I do not think I can wind up better than with the proud man’s prayer. Will you join Jeremy Taylor and me in offering it? Well, it is this: ‘Thou, O God, wilt Thou do something for the proudest of men also? Make me humble-minded, and lowly in heart. Take away from me all this spirit of pride and haughtiness and ambition and self-flattery; all this self-confidence, and all this unseemly gaiety of mine. Teach me to love concealment; teach me to love to be little esteemed. Let me be heartily ashamed of all my past sin, and all my present folly. Enable me to bear reproaches evenly, for I have fully deserved them all, and to refuse and to lay down all the honours that are offered me because in reality I have deserved none of them. Also to suffer all reproof thankfully, and then to amend all my faults speedily. Invest my soul with the humble robe of my meek Master and Saviour Jesus Christ. And when I have humbly, patiently, charitably, and diligently served Thee on earth, change my confusion into glory, my folly into perfect knowledge and true wisdom, and all my weaknesses and dishonours into the strength and the beauty of the sons of God. And in the meantime use what means Thou pleasest to conform me more and more to the sweet image of Thy Son. Make me gentle to all men and only severe to myself. Make me willing to sit down in the lowest place, striving to go before my brother in nothing but in doing him and Thee honour and service. Grant me all this, O God, for His sake who humbled Himself to the Cross, and who is now with Thee in my behalf my Example and my Advocate; to whom be all glory, and all praise, and all dominion, for ever and ever. Amen.’