sufficient evidences of humility, Pharaoh would never have received the reproof in our text: for on the plague of hail being inflicted, he sent for Moses and said, " I have sinned this time. The Lord is righteous ; and I and my people are wicked c." But notwithstanding this, in God's estimation he still, as the text expresses it, " refused to humble himself be- fore God." Yet is this the only humiliation which many amongst ourselves have ever experienced. In a time of sick- ness perhaps, or under any great and accumulated afflictions, we have been constrained to confess our desert of God's judg- ments. We have seen, that He has been contending with us ; and that yet heavier judgments awaited us, if we did not hum- ble ourselves before him. We have trembled perhaps at the prospect of approaching dissolution, and at the thought of appearing in an unprepared state at the tribunal of our Judge. Hence have arisen some forced acknowledgments of our sin- fulness, whilst yet we neither hated our sins, nor lothed our- selves on account of them : and hence, on our restoration to health, we have returned, like fused metal from the furnace, to our wonted hardness and obduracy.
True humiliation is widely different from this. It implies a deep and ingenuous sorrow for sin, not only on account of the judgments it will bring upon us, but on account of its own intrinsic hatefulness and deformity. It leads us to smite on our breasts with conscious shame ; and fills us with self-lothing and self-abhorrence : and this it does not only before we have obtained mercy, but afterwards ; yea, and so much the more because God is pacified towards us d.
We readily acknowledge that tears are no certain sign of penitence ; and that the sensibility that produces them depends rather on the constitutional habit, than on the convictions of the mind. Yet whilst we read so much in the Scriptures respecting men sowing in tears, and going on their way weep- ing, and whilst we behold the Saviour himself weeping over Jerusalem, and pouring out his soul before God with strong crying and tears, we cannot but think, that those who have never yet wept for sin, have never felt its bitterness : and there is just occasion for us to weep over all who have not yet wept for themselves. It is scarcely to be conceived that any man has a truly broken and contrite spirit, whose sighs and groans have not often entered into the ears of the omnipresent God, and whose tears have not been often treasured up in his vials.]
2. An unreserved obedience to God, as contrasted with partial compliances —
[Pharaoh, under the pressure of his successive calamities,
c Exod. ix. 27. d Job xlii G. with Ezek. xvi. 63.