the fountain of life and felicity; and surrender yourselves to his mercy, that he may impart to you the joy which a present world can neither give nor take away, and which will delight, and elevate, and enrapture your souls, through all the ages of eternity. 148 SERMON VII. HUMILITY EXPLAINED, AND ITS NECESSITY ENFORCED. JAMES IV. 10. Humble yourselves in the sight of the Lord, and he shall lift you up. HumILITY stands opposed to pride. And as pride consists in our entertaining higher ideas of ourselves than truth will warrant, and in our presuming upon these, both in feeling and in practice, as if they were just and correct, so humility consists in our entertaining accurate notions of what we really are in relation to some one above us, and in preserving that station which a regard to our real merits requires us to occupy, as to the sentiments we cherish and the conduct we maintain, with respect to those under whom we are placed. There is a species of humility which does not come under this definition; but then, it is not humility properly so called. It might be more exactly denominated condescension. It is a going down-not to the situation which strictly belongs to the being of whom it may be asserted -but to a situation lower than that which he natively and righteously holds, in order to perform some particular duty, or to engage in some particular exercise of mercy. Thus when the Christian, in obedience to divine precept, "condescends to men of low estate," he is said to be humble; but the act itself, on account of which he is called humble, is simply the act of placing himself on a level with those to whom he is otherwise superior, and is entitled to the appellation of humility as a Christian grace, because his obligations demand it, and his condition does not forbid it. Christ is said, somewhat in the same sense, to have humbled himself, when he became our incarnate and suffering Redeemer; for when he thus humbled himself, humility could not possibly be an attribute of his character; but he became humble, or stooped from the divine eminence on which he stood, and assumed a nature, and undertook a work, and clothed himself with circumstances, all which involved necessarily the idea of lowliness, and exacted from him corresponding views and corresponding deportment. And still more, humility is ascribed to God, though spoken of as "over all," and not in reference to any such events as took place in the humiliation of Christ. He is said to "humble himself to behold the things that are in heaven and in the earth,"-a phraseology which is intended to intimate, not that there is any thing in his nature and circumstances which make humility either indispensable or becoming, or that he is really practising humility when he takes an inspection of his own universe, but only that he is so great and glorious in the eternity of his being, and in the infinitude of his perfections, that it looks like humility, or a declining from his inconceivable elevation, when he concerns himself with created things which are all but of yesterday, and are speedily to be dissolved and to perish. The humility inculcated in my text, is humility in reference, not to another creature more exalted than ourselves, but to God, who is im measurably exalted above all creatures. And in this simple relation, even though we had done nothing to offend him, humility is at once graceful and necessary; for, as we owe every thing to him, and as we depend upon him for every thing, it would be arrogant, presumptuous, undutiful, to have one thought towards him or to make one movement before him, which proceeded on the supposition that we were not so indebted and so dependent. Not only are our bodily endowments and our outward prosperity derived exclusively from his sovereign pleasure; but were our moral excellence such as his eye could behold without blame or dissatisfaction, still that would be the result of his divine operation, the gift of his undeserved goodness; and, therefore, it would be incumbent on us to look to him, to feel towards him, to be governed by him, as those who had nothing of their own whereof to boast, -to avoid every thing approaching to self-sufficiency or self-confidence-to live at all times and in every respect as the offspring of his power, and as the pensioners of his bounty-to withhold no kind of acknowledgment and no degree of obeisance, which could possibly be required on the one side, or rendered on the other. But the humility enjoined upon us not only respects our relation to God as his creatures, whose every faculty, and whose every attainment, and whose every possession, must be traced to him, and to him alone-it also respects our relation to him as his sinful creatures—as creatures who have set themselves in opposition to his authority-as creatures who are thus removed at a still greater distance from him than they naturally were as creatures who have not merely received from his free benignity all that they have of good, but who are, moreover, sadly degraded and polluted in his sight, and liable to his high and holy indignation. The angels in heaven are endowed with vast powers-they fill an elevated sphere-they have retained their moral dignity, and have no sin to make them ashamed. And yet even to them humility is suitable, because all that is worthy in them is an emanation from God, and their very continuance in his presence and in his service, is a proof that |