Now they are described here as the humble in heart.  Two things are required for this state of mind.  One is that a man should have a true estimate of God, and the other is that he should have a true estimate of himself.

Vain, blind man, places himself on a little corner of this planet, a speck upon a speck of the universe, and begins to form conclusions from the small fraction of God’s government which he can see from thence.  The astronomer looks at the laws of motion and forgets that there must have been a First Cause to commence that motion.  The surgeon looks at the materialism of his own frame and forgets that matter cannot organise itself into exquisite beauty.  The metaphysician buries himself in the laws of mind and forgets that there may be spiritual influences producing all those laws.  And this brethren, is the unhumbled spirit of philosophy—­intellectual pride.  Men look at Nature, but they do not look through it up to Nature’s God.  There is awful ignorance of God, arising from indulged sin, which produces an unhumbled heart.  God may be shut out from the soul by pride of intellect, or by pride of heart.

Pharaoh is placed before us in Scripture almost as a type of pride.  His pride arose from ignorance of God.  “Who is the Lord that I should obey His voice?  I know not the Lord, neither will I let Israel go.”  And this was not intellectual pride; it was pride in a matter of duty.  Pharaoh had been immersing his whole heart in the narrow politics of Egypt.  The great problem of his day was to aggrandise his own people and prevent an insurrection of the Israelites; and that small kingdom of Egypt had been his universe.  He shut his heart to the voice of justice and the voice of humanity; in other words, great in the pride of human majesty, small in the sight of the High and Lofty One, he shut himself out from the knowledge of God.

The next ingredient of humbleness is, that a man must have a right estimate of himself.  There is a vast amount of self-deception on this point.  We say of ourselves that which we could not bear others to say of us.  A man truly humbled would take it only as his due when others treated him in the way that he says that he deserves.  But my brethren, we kneel in our closets in shame for what we are, and we tell our God that the lowest place is too good for us; and then we go into the world, and if we meet with slight or disrespect, or if our opinion be not attended to, or if another be preferred before us, there is all the anguish of a galled and jealous spirit, and half the bitterness of our lives comes from this, that we are smarting from what we call the wrongs and the neglect of men.  My beloved brethren, if we saw ourselves as God sees us, we should be willing to be anywhere, to be silent when others speak, to be passed by in the world’s crowd,