and the most subtle of human minds; and, no doubt whatever, He had the most practised skill in reading off what lay closest to His own heart.  And, then, it was just His attainment of the most perfect humility, and then His absolute ascertainment of the same, that enabled Him to say:  Take My yoke upon you and learn of Me.  At the same time, divine as the grace is, and divine as the insight is that is able to trace it out in all its exquisite refinements of thought and feeling in the sanctified soul, yet humility is a human virtue after all, and it is open to all men to attain to it and intelligently and lovingly to exercise it.  The simplest and the least philosophical soul now in this house may apply to himself some of the subtlest and most sensitive tests of humility, as much as if he were Dr. Duncan or Dr. Newman themselves; and may thus with all assurance of hope know whether he is a counterfeit and a castaway or no.

Take this test for one, then.  Explain this text to me:  Phil. ii. 3—­“In lowliness of mind let each esteem other better than himself.”  Explain and illustrate that.  Not from a commentary, but straight out from your own heart.  What does your heart make of that scripture?  Does your heart turn away from that scripture almost in anger at it?  Do you say you are certain that there must be some other explanation of it than that?  Do you hold that this is just another of Paul’s perpetual hyperboles, and that the New Testament is the last book in the world to be taken as it reads?  Yes; both bold and subtle father that he is:  counterfeits abound!

Another much blunter test, but, perhaps, a sufficiently sharp test, is this:  How do you receive correction and instruction?  Does your heart meekly and spontaneously and naturally take to correction and instruction as the most natural and proper thing possible to you?  And do you immediately, and before all men, show forth and exhibit the correction and the instruction?  Or, does this rather take place?  Does your heart beat, and swell, and boil, and boil over at him who dares to correct or counsel you?  If this is a fair test to put our humility to, how little humility there is among us!  How few men any of us could name among our friends to whom we would risk telling all the things that behind their backs we point out continually to others?  We are terrified to face their pride.  We once did it, and we are not to do it again, if we can help it!  Let a man not have too many irons in the fire; let him examine himself just by these two tests for the time—­what he thinks of himself, and what he thinks of those who attempt, and especially before other people, to set him right.  And after these two tests have been satisfied, others will no doubt be supplied till that so humble man is made very humility itself.