HUMILITY
William Law

Humility does not consist in having a worse opinion of ourselves than we deserve, or in abasing ourselves lower than we really are. But, as all virtue is founded in truth, so humility is founded in a true and just sense of our weakness, misery and sin. He that rightly feels and lives in this sense of his condition lives in humility. Let any man but look back upon his own life and see what use he has made of his reason, how little he has consulted it, how less he has followed it! What foolish passions, what vain thoughts, what needless labours, what extravagant projects have taken up the greatest part of his life! How foolish he has been in his words and conversation; how seldom he has done well in judgment, and how often he has been kept from doing ill by accident; how seldom he has been able to please himself, and how often he has changed his counsels, hated what he loved, and loved what he hated; how often he has been enraged and transported at trifles, pleased and displeased with the very same things, and constantly changing from one vanity to another! Let a man but take this view of his own life, and he will see reason enough to confess that pride was not made for man.

Let any man but consider that, if the world knew all of him that he knows of himself, if they saw what vanity and passions govern his inside, and what secret tempers sully and corrupt his best actions, he would have no more pretence to be honoured and admired for his goodness and wisdom than a rotten and deformed body to be loved and admired for its beauty and comeliness. This is so true, and so known to the hearts of almost all people, that nothing would appear more dreadful to them than to have their hearts thus fully discovered to the eyes of all beholders. And perhaps there are a few people in the world that would not rather choose to die, than to have all their secret follies, the errors of their judgments, the vanity of their minds, the falseness of their pretences, the frequency of their vain and disorderly passions, their uneasiness, hatred, envies, and vexations made known to the world.

And shall pride be entertained in a heart thus conscious of its own miserable behaviour? Shall a creature in such a condition that he could not support himself under the shame of being known to the world in his real state—shall such a creature, because his shame is known only to God, to holy angels, and to his own conscience, shall he in the sight of God and holy angels dare to be vain and proud of himself?

And here it is to be observed that every son of Adam is in the service of pride and self, be doing what he will, until a humility that comes only from heaven becomes his redeemer. Till then all that he doth will be done by the right hand that the left may know it. And he that thinks it possible for the natural man to get a better humility than this from his own "right reason" (as it is often miscalled), refined by education, shows himself quite ignorant of this one most plain and capital truth of the gospel--namely, that there never was, nor ever will be, but one Humility in the world, and that is the one Humility of Christ, which never any man, since the fall of Adam, had any degree of but from Christ. Humility is one, in the same sense and truth as Christ is one, the Mediator is one, and Redemption is one. There are not two Lambs of God that take away the sin of the world. But if there was any humility besides that of Christ, there would be something else besides Him that could take away the sin of the world (Phil. 2:8; Heb. 9:26). "All that came before Me," says Christ, "were thieves and robbers." We are used to confining this saying to persons; but the same is true of every virtue, whether it has the name of Humility, Charity, Piety, or anything else. If it comes before Christ, however good it may pretend to be, it is but a cheat, a thief, and a robber, under the name of a godly virtue. And the reason is that pride and self have the all of man, till man has his all from Christ.

He therefore only fights the good fight, whose strife is that the self-idolatrous nature, which he hath from Adam, may be brought to death by the supernatural humility of Christ, brought to life in Him. The enemies to man's rising out of the fall of Adam, through the Spirit and power of Christ, are many. But the one great dragon-enemy is self-exaltation. This is his birth, his pomp, his power, and his throne; when self -exaltation ceases, the last enemy is destroyed, and all that came from the pride and death of Adam is swallowed up in Victory.

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