mountain upon mountain, Pelion upon Ossa, to reach and conquer the heavenly heights, of their being hurled back by Zeus with his swift thunderbolts, and then cast as prisoners into the underworld; indeed, Greek sentiment consistently warned man against bearing himself too loftily, lest he should excite the Divine ill-will-they feared unbroken good fortune, as sure to arouse the envy of the gods and bring calamity and woes in its train. When success smiled too persistently upon a mortal, then was the time for him to ward off the vengeance of the heavens by large voluntary sacrifices, and so to buy himself off from supernatural punishment.

"

Of course, neither Jewish nor Christian thought countenances the notion of God grudging us happiness or plenty, or desiring to punish us for the mere fact of being successful; for us this whole question is answered fully and finally in our Saviour's words: "If ye then desire to give good gifts unto your children, how much more your Father which is in heaven! Nevertheless, the feeling of the sinfulness of pride, the duty of humbleness, goes right through our religion, alike in the Old and the New Testament: "to walk humbly with thy God" is one of the three requirements laid on man by the Lord; "he that exalteth himself shall be humbled, and he that humbleth himself shall be exalted," proclaims the Gospel; and the same note is sounded again and again in the Book of Proverbs: "Before destruction the heart of man is haughty," we read, "and before honour goeth humility"; and again, and again, "A man's pride shall bring him low but he that is of a lowly spirit shall obtain honour."

Now the first thing which it occurs to me to say in connection with this subject is to utter a warning against the pitfalls of unreality which beset it. I am afraid that what I said in an earlier sermon about charity applies equally to humility: the word is one which has lost caste, it has gathered around it associations that do not appeal to us. The prevalence of imitations has made us suspicious of the genuine thing. The hat-touching, curtseying humbleness which fawns and cringes for favours is the ugly product and counterpart of the kind of charity which bestows doles and saps the independence of those who receive them. There is a cant of humility which is positively odious, because it is utterly insincere, a mere cloak which hides cunning and self-seeking. The genius of Dickens portrayed that loathsome type, smirking, shifty, treacherous, once for all in Uriah Heap. Who has not had experience of the soft-spoken, deferential, self-effacing individual, who merely masks and disguises by those means his real disposition, and is all the while serving his own ends? What diffidence, what lowliness some people will display when there is anything to be made out of it! And again, how others will humbly decline to put themselves forward, when it would mean doing some extra work, or placing themselves in the fighting line! The wonderful modesty and self-distrusting shyness which keeps men tongue-tied rather than give utterance to unpopular, heretical, unfashionable opinionsthe humility, in a word, which is the excuse of the shirker, the coward, the man who wants to be friends with both sides, but chiefly with the side that has the loaves and fishes to distribute! We know it all, and we instinctively despise and recoil from it.

And then again-for we may as well take stock of these shams, and nail them to the counter-there is the affected self-depreciation which is only an indirect way, and a very annoying one, of challenging an admiring tribute. Let me use an illustration which always rises to my mind in this connection. You go to the wonderful islands on Lake Maggiore, owned by the Borromean family; you survey the gardens with all their varied and beautiful growths, go over the ducal palace where everything bespeaks vast riches, and finally, as you stand on the topmost garden terrace, overlooking this glorious picture set in an azure frame of shimmering water, almost overwhelmed by so much splendour and loveliness, you note the stone-carved family motto of the owners-the one word HUMILITASand the pretence strikes you as so grotesque as to be not altogether decent. You remember the lines of Coleridge-and how well they fit the occasion:

A "cottage" of gentility;

And the Devil did grin, for his darling sin

Is pride that apes humility.

But, further, it has to be confessed, I think, that in religion particularly there has been far too much of this unreality of language and sentiment, with the result that honest and healthy people have been driven into revolt. Let me explain. It is not natural for average men and women-by no means angels or saints, but trying on the whole to live reputable lives -to profess themselves Sunday by Sunday" miserable offenders," or to speak of the filthy rags of their righteousness, or of themselves as worms; they do not mean it, and they would be highly incensed if their

neighbours took their language seriously-how then can they expect God to take it seriously? Do we think we can cajole Him, or deceive Him, or propitiate Him, by the use of such self-degrading phrases? Let us shun unreality in all our relationships; but let us shun religious unreality as the very pestilence, for if we strike false notes here, the whole music of our lives will be inevitably falsified. The man who habitually crawls to his Maker will in too many instances habitually ride roughshod over his dependents, deal harshly with his employees, be an overbearing despot and bully; and the crawl and the harshness explain each other. I leave that statement there; every business man will bear me out.

But now that we are done with the shams and counterfeits, I am afraid we must own that humility at its best is apt to strike the modern man or woman as rather a negative attribute-what Milton called a fugitive and cloistered virtue. We would rather have something to be proud of than to be humble about; we would rather do and dare, and fight our way, than be everlastingly making excuses for ourselves. Let humility, we say in our hearts, be the attitude and the apology of those who have done nothing with their lives, or even of the feebly and ineffectually good; but for ourselves, we would rather take Browning's strenuous lines for our motto :

Let a man contend to the uttermost,

For his life's set prize, be it what it will!

It is not by being self-distrustful and apologetic that men have overcome difficulties without and within, enlarged their powers, subjugated the forces of nature,

established their dominion, or developed their character. If we would not be left behind in the race, we must believe in ourselves, insist on ourselves, assert ourselves; and we distrust humility as the synonym of inefficiency and the prelude of failure-failure which renders no service to God or man, but in the counting up means only so much waste.

In all this, I confess, there is an element of truth ; but we may be very sure that it is not this kind of humility that either the Old Testament or the New advocates and enjoins. On the one hand, the race which has gathered up its maxims of life in the Book of Proverbs has always had an abundant share of vitality and energy, it has fought for success and attained success along every variety of road; and again, Jesus, who spoke of Himself as meek and lowly, and who commended the humble, flashed forth the quality of His mind in the bold assertion, "Ye have heard that it was said unto them of old . . . but I say unto you"; He showed it in His whole uncompromising attitude towards the Law, and in driving the money-changers forth from the Temple. What, then, we ask ourselves again, is the humility we are asked to cultivate as a grace of character?

Well, in the first place, I need hardly point out that, however much we may talk of the necessity of selfconfidence for success, it is still a fact borne out by everyday experience that pride goeth before a fall, and that before destruction the heart of man is haughty. It is one of the commonest forms of insanity which culminates in a man's delusions that he is the Emperor · of the world, or has amassed fabulous riches, or made some gigantic invention which places undreamt-of