T| Humility is the great ornament and jewel of Christian religion ; that whereby it is distinguished from all the wisdom of the world; it not having been taught by the wise men of the Gentiles, but first put into a discipline, and made part of a religion, by our Lord Jesus Christ; who propounded Himself imitable by His disciples so signally in nothing as in the twin sisters of meek- ness and humility ; " learn of me, for I am meek and humble ; and ye shall find rest unto your souls." For all the world, all that we are, and all that we have, our bodies and our souls, our actions and our sufferings, our conditions at home, our accidents abroad, our many sins and our seldom virtues, are as so many arguments to make our souls dwell low in the deep valleys of humility.1 1 Jeremy Taylor, Holy Living, chap. ii. sec. iv.
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3. Is this everything ? If to do justly and to love mercy and to walk humbly with one's God is all that is required, what advantage hath Christianity ? Much every way, but chiefly in this : man has ever known his duty, but he has ever lacked the power to fulfil it. Christianity alone has supplied the power. The world has been like a well-constructed but motionless machine ; it needed what Christianity has supplied — motive power. Call it conscience, moral sense, natural religion, what you will, man has ever had a sacred witness and a faithful monitor ; but what has that availed ? The bitter cry of human helplessness has ever been going up :
Ah, if he gives not arms as well as rules, What can he more than tell us we are fools ?
Christianity has given "arms," whilst every other system merely furnished " rules."
The essentials of a religious life have always been the same. The difference between the Old Testament and the New is not a difference of kind, but a difference of degree. Jesus Christ repeatedly affirmed that He had not come to inaugurate a new religion. " Think not that I came to destroy the law and the prophets; I came not to destroy, but to fulfil." The law was given for a foundation, the " grace and truth " of Jesus Christ for fulfilment ; just as the artist first places on the canvas the firm clear outlines of his figures, then lays on the colours which give grace to the form and expression to the features.
Our Lord has really added nothing to these words of Micah. What He has done has been to put these truths in a new setting ; to read them with a wider and deeper application ; to embody them in His own life, and thus to enforce them with greater authority ; to give us a new motive for obedience, and greater power to obey. What does the cross of Christ say to us but " Do justly " ? It shows us the enormity of sin, its awful con- sequences, its proper deserving, the rigour of the Divine justice which could not forgive without such satisfaction. What, again, does the cross of Christ say to us but " Love mercy " ? There is the crowning exhibition of pity and love ! We look, and say with John, " If God so loved us, we ought also to love one another." And it is at the cross that we find the way " to walk humbly with
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our God." Every barrier has been removed there. Through Him who hangs there we have " access unto the Father."
^f Speaking at the Keswick Convention in 1902, the Bishop of Durham (Dr. Handley Moule) remarked : " Twenty years ago, it was said to me by a young Oriental student at Cambridge, just on the verge of stepping into the full light of God and joy in Christ, after long and cautious inquiries into Christianity — it was said to me in words that I cannot forget — ' I have been reading your sacred Book ; and the difference between it and our sacred books in the East is not altogether in its precepts ; for there are wonderful precepts, high and great, also in our books ; but your Book, and yours alone, contains, I see, the secret of how they may be done.'"
^ The power of man to stand between abstract truth upon the one side and the concrete facts of life upon the other comes from the co-existence in his human nature of two different powers, without the possession of both of which no man possesses a complete humanity. One of these powers is the power of knowing, and the other is the power of loving. The power of knowing, however the knowledge may be sought or won, whether by patient study or quick-leaping intuition, including imagination and all the poetic power, faith, trust in authority, the faculty of getting wisdom by experience, everything by which the human nature comes into direct relationship to truth, and tries to learn, and in any degree succeeds in knowing — that is one necessary element of manhood. And the other is Love, the power of sympathetic intercourse with things and people, the power to be touched by the personal nature with which we have to do — love therefore including hate, for hate is only the reverse utterance of love, the negative expression of the foul's affection ; to hate any- thing is vehemently to love its opposite. Love thus, as the whole element of personal affection and relationship of every sort, this, too, is necessary, in order that a man may really be a man. . . .