Humility — C.H. Spurgeon

The New Park Street Pulpit. Humility. A sermon delivered on Sunday morning, March 17th, 1861, by the Reverend C. H. Spurgeon at Exeter Hall Strand. Acts 20, 19, serving the Lord with all humility of mind.

Humility and the Difficulty of Judging Our Own Hearts

It is not often that a man may safely speak about his own humility. Humble men are mostly conscious of great pride, while those who are boastful of humility have nothing but false pretense and really lack and want it.

I question whether any of us are at all judges as to our pride or humility, for verily pride so often assumes the shape of loneliness when it hath its own end to serve. And loneliness, on the other hand, is so perfectly compatible with the heavenly dignity of decision that it is not easy at all times to discover which is the counterfeit and which is the precious and genuine coin.

Paul as the Pattern of Humble Service

You will remember that in the case in our text, Paul speaks by inspiration. If it were not for this fact, I would not have believed even Paul himself when he spoke of his own humility. So distrustful do I feel of our judgment upon this point that if he had not spoken under the infallible witness and guidance of the Holy Spirit, I should have said that the text was not true.

That when a man should say he served God with humbleness of mind, speaking merely from his own judgment, there was clear proof before you that he was a proud man. But Paul speaketh not to his own commendation, but with the sole motive of clearing his hands of the blood of all men.

Led no doubt by the Holy Ghost thus to speak, that he might, by an example to all coming ages, he becomes the mirror to all the ministers of Christ. That we too, each of us in our degree serving the Lord, may without degree be filled with humility, taking the lowest seat, not esteeming ourselves beyond what we ought to think, but submitting ourselves to men of lowest state, emptying out ourselves as he did, who emptied himself of all his glory when he came to save our souls.

The Four Dimensions of Humility

I shall take the text this evening and shall speak of it as the Lord shall please to help me in my weakness thus first. I shall speak of the comprehensiveness of humility. You notice the text says, serving the Lord with all humility.

Secondly I shall speak upon the trials to which our humility will be subjected, and thirdly upon the arguments by which we ought to support it, to generate it, and to sustain it in our souls. And then fourthly, I shall show you some practical effects of humility, or rather urge you to show them forth with me in our daily lives.

Humility Opposed to Doctrinal Pride

First then, the comprehensiveness of humility. It is a somewhat striking expression. It is not merely serving the Lord with humility, but serving the Lord with all humility. There are many sorts of pride.

Perhaps while I am running over the list you will be able, by looking at the contrast, to see that there must be also many kinds of humility. There is the pride of the heretic, who will utter false doctrines because he thinks his own judgment to be better than the word of God.

Never content to sit like a child to believe what he is told, he is a disputant, but not a disciple. He will insist upon it that his own reason is to be the wellspring of his own beliefs, and he will receive nothing beyond his own reach.

Now Paul never had the heretic's pride. He could say, God forbid that I should glory save in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ. Nay, so willing was he to sit at the feet of Jesus that he counted all the learning which he had received at the feet of Gamaliel to be of no value in itself, but became a fool that he might be wise.

He spoke not with the wisdom of words nor with human learning, but with the demonstration of the Spirit and with power. There is next the pride of the papist, who attaches merit to his own works and hopes to win heaven as the reward of his own doings.

From this Paul was totally free. He had humility, which is the very contrast of it. Often did he say, when speaking of himself, Yet not I, but Christ. He learned to count his righteousness as filthy rags, and all his former doings were to him but dross and dung, that he might win Christ and be found in him.

Humility Opposed to Speculative Curiosity

Next there is the pride of the curious, the man who is not content with simplicities, but must pry into mysteries. He would, if he could, climb to the eternal throne and read between those folded leaves and break the seven seals of the mysterious book of destiny.

You know well our Apostle has many things in his writings which are hard to be understood, yet he uttered them because of the Spirit. And you never meet with any attempt in the Apostle's writings, as you do in the preaching of some ministers, as you do in the conversation of some professors, to reconcile predestination with free will.

He was quite content to preach to men as free agents and exhort them to repent, quite willing to speak of God as working in us to will and to do of his good pleasure, while we also work out our own salvation with fear and trembling.

Paul was never curious to find out where the lines of truth met. He was perfectly content to take his doctrine from his master's spirit and leave the old wives' fables and endless genealogies and disputings and questionings to those who had no better guests to entertain.

Humility Opposed to Persecution and Rebellion

Again there is the pride of the persecutor, the man who is not content with his own notions, but would hunt to death another. The pride which suggests that I am infallible and that if any man should differ from me, the stake in the rack would be the due deserts of so great a sin against so great a person as myself.

Now the Apostle ever acted towards those who were without with the greatest wisdom and kindness, and though full often he was beaten with rods or subjected to false brethren or hailed before the magistrates, I think he had none of the spirit of Elijah that would bring down fire from heaven upon any man.

He was kind and had that charity which suffereth long and hopeth all things and endureth all things and believeth all things. In this, too, you have an instance of all humility. He had the humility of a man of generous spirit.

Then there is the pride of the impenitent man who will not yield to God, who saith, I am free. I was never under dominion to any. My neck hath never felt the rain. My jaw hath never felt the bit. Not so our Apostle.

He was ever humble, teachable, and filled even to sorrowfulness with a sense of his own unworthiness. O wretched man that I am, said he, who shall deliver me from the body of this death? Far enough was he from rebellion against the Most High God, for he would sit at the feet of Christ and learn, and he would lie at the foot of the throne in dust and ashes and confess himself to be the very chief of sinners and less than the least of all the saints.

I think you will very soon learn from the contrast I have presented to you what the Apostle meant when he said, In all humility. There are many sorts of pride. There are many sorts of humility, too. The Apostle had them all, or rather they were blended together in a sweet mixture in his daily preaching and conversation.

Humility Before, During, and After Service

I think this evening, to give you a clear view of the comprehensiveness of humility, I will put it to you in another shape. Some of the old writers who like to use terms to sound very much alike say there is a proposed humility or humility before the service of God, there is an opposed humility or humility during the service of God, which continues under trial, and there is, thirdly, an imposed humility when the soul, conscious of sin during the act, imposes upon itself the task of bending before God and offering repentance for its sin.

Not caring much for these terms, because I think that old writers went out of their way to make them, I will be content with the substance. There is humility before serving God. When a man lacks this, he proposes to himself his own honor and his own esteem in serving God.

How easy it is for us to preach a sermon having our eye upon our hearers, hoping that they will be satisfied with us and will say, He spoke right, well, the man is an orator, he is eloquent. Hey, and how easy it is to propose to please yourself so that you may be able to say as you come down from the rostrum, I have not fell today in my own judgment, and I am satisfied with myself.

This is pride before service, and it will mar everything. If we do not come to God's altar humbly, we cannot come acceptably. Whether we preach or pray or give alms or whatever we do, it is needful that we bend exceedingly low before we enter upon the work, for if not, self-seeking, self-glorifying will lie at the bottom of all, and God neither can nor will accept us.

Look at too many Christians. How little of that humility before service have they. They will pick that position in the church which will give them most honor, and if there be work to do which will confer no position upon them, they leave that to others.

If you require a man to occupy an honorable position in the church, you can find scores, but if you need one who shall be a menial in the house of God, who shall be the least in God's heritage, how difficult to find an individual.

We are so pleased with the glitter of publicity and the glory of man's esteem that I doubt not in us all there is some tinge of choosing our position for the honor's sake rather than for God's sake, but it was never so with the apostle.

I think I see him now working long past midnight, making his tents, taking stitch after stitch with his needle to the hard canvas, working away to provide for his own individual needs because an ungracious people held back the laborer's reward.

When I see that tentmaker going into the pulpit with his hands all blistered with his hard work, rough and horny as a laborer's hands, you would say of him at once, in getting up to speak, that man never proposes to himself the praises of his hearers.

He is not like the Grecian orator who will go anywhere to get a clap, turn aside to tell any tale or to preach anything if he can but excite his audience to say, he is an orator. Let us write him down among the great names.

Let us put the crown upon his head and celebrate him through the midst of Greece as being the golden-mouthed man who can speak right mightily as if the bees of Hybla had hived their honey upon his lips.

Never could you see that in Paul. You could discover at once that his solitary aim was to win souls and so to glorify Christ. Let us labor after this as a part of all humility. But again, there is in the next place humility during the act.

Giving God the Glory During Successful Ministry

When a man finds that God is with him, he may be base enough to glorify himself. He may have been very humble indeed when he began the battle, but there is one enemy there at his feet, and another has just been dashed down by a blow from his right hand.

The evil one whispers in his ear, Thou hast done well, Thou art doing well, and then pride comes in and spoils all. That is a splendid psalm which begins, Not unto us. David thought it needful to say it twice.

Not unto us, O Lord, not unto us. Then he deals the death blow with the other sentence, But unto Thy name be all the glory. To sing that song when you are trampling on your foes, to sing that song when you are reaping the great harvest, to sing that song when God's people are fed under your ministry, to sing that song when you are going on from strength to strength, conquering and to conquer will prove a healthy state of heart.

Nothing but the most extraordinary grace can keep us in our right position while we are serving God, and God is honoring us. We are so inclined to filch His jewels from the crown, to put them on our own breasts, if we would not steal the diadem itself, yet we look with longing eyes upon it as if we would like to wear it, if but a single moment.

I have thought sometimes how many Christians are like the son of Henry IV, who, when his father lies asleep, puts the crown on his head. You and I have done the same. We have forgotten God. He was to us as one that sleepeth, and we began to put the crown on our head.

O fools that we are! Our time for crown-wearing has not come. We do but anger our father and bring grief into our spirits when we think of crowning ourselves instead of crowning him, worshiping our own image instead of bending before the Lord God, Jehovah.

Christian men and women, and especially thou, O my own soul, let us take heed that while serving God we serve Him as the angels do, who with twain cover their faces, with twain cover their feet, while with twain they fly upon His errands.

Humility After the Work Is Finished

Then there is another kind of humility, to make up all humility, humility after the service is done, and looking back upon success achieved, upon heights attained, upon efforts which have been blessed, it is so easy to say, My right hand and my mighty arm have gotten me the victory.

Men generally allow their fellow creatures some little congratulation. Can a man congratulate you without admitting that you may congratulate yourself? Now there is respect and honor to be given to the man of God who has served his race and his master.

By all manner of means let the names of Luther and Calvin and Zwingle be held in honor. Hath not God Himself said it, The righteous shall be had an everlasting remembrance? It were wrong in us if we did not honor God's servants, for it would seem as if we dishonored the master, but it will never do for the servant of God to honor himself.

After his work is done he must lay his head upon his death pillow, saying, I am not worthy of the least of all Thy mercies. What am I, and what is my father's house that Thou hast brought me hitherto?

I am, having done all, but an unprofitable servant. I have not even done so much as it was my duty to have done. Sabbath school teachers, tax distributors, visitors of the sick, ye that feed the hungry and clothed the naked, especially ye deacons and elders, ministers of the church, see to it that never, when your work is done, you speak of yourselves or of your work.

No, your brethren, even if you speak in humble terms apparently, will soon find when you talk much of what you do that you are proud of it. You may think that you have misled them, but you certainly have not, much less have you deceived your God.

Take care that you put your finger on your own beauty. When you are painting another man, imitate Apellas, who drew Alexander with his finger upon the scar. But when you are painting yourself, put your finger over your choice beauty, for depend upon it that the hiding finger of your modesty will be more beautiful than the beauty you conceal.

Labor then for God's sake, for the church's sake, for your own sake, to serve the Lord with all humility-humility before the act, humility during the service, and humility when all is done, serving the Lord with all humility of mind.

The Trials of Humility: Ability and Talent

But secondly, the trials of humility, or the dangers through which it has to pass. First and foremost, one of the trials to which humility will be exposed is the possession of great ability. When a man has seven talents, he must recollect that he has seven burdens, and he that hath ten, if he hath more than others, should feel that he hath ten times any other man's burden of responsibility, and therefore he should be bowed down.

Let a man feel that he possesses more power than another, more eloquence, more mental acumen, more learning, more imagination, and he is so apt to sit down and say, I am something, I am something in the church.

One may speak indeed with solemnity here. It is so ridiculous for us ever to boast of any talents which God has given us. It is as though the debtor in the jail should say, I am a better man than you, for I am in debt ten thousand pounds, and you only a hundred.

The more we have, the more we owe, and how can there be any ground for boasting there? A man might as well be proud because he is six feet high while another is only five feet six inches, as be proud that he hath ten talents while another has only five.

We are what God has made us. So far as gifts are concerned, if the Lord said to Moses, Who hath made man's mouth? Because Moses said he was of stammering speech, ye may say that to yourselves, if ye can speak well, or if ye act well, who hath made man's arm?

Or if ye think well, who hath made man's brain? The honor never can be to the thing itself, but to that mighty one who made it what it is. Great talent makes it hard for a man to maintain humility. Shall I surprise you when I say that little talents have precisely the same effect?

I have seen in my short time some of the biggest men I ever set my eyes upon who were the smallest insects that were ever subjected to the microscope. Some great men in the pulpit, too, stately, dignified, magnificent, majestic, men of whom a fortune could have been made outright if you could but have bought them at their proper value and sold them in their opinion was their worth, men who were only fit to be bishops.

They never could have been the inferior clergy. A curate's place would have been utterly insignificant, for to have been a tentmaker or an ordinary preacher like Paul would have been far beneath their level.

They always have the idea that they were born on a very fortunate day, and that the world owes them the utmost consideration and respect merely for their doing human beings the honor of living in the midst of them, though there is nothing very much they have ever done.

Now little talents often make a man proud. There, says he, I have but a trifle in the world, I must make a flair with it. I have but one ring, and I will always put the finger that wears that outward so that it may be seen.

It is a very common habit of all people who wear rings to keep the fingers on which they wear them always exposed to view, especially if they have only one ring. If a man has no gold in his pocket, he is sure to put on gold shirt studs, and if a man has scarce any wealth at all, he is sure to put it on his back because he must keep up a position, and that position never having been his rightful position, he is obliged to maintain it at great cost.

Now if you have little talents and feel you have, do not swell and burst with envy. The frog was never contemptible as a frog, but when he tried to blow himself out to the size of the bullock in the meadow, then he was contemptible indeed.

I have frequently had this observation made to me in the most pompous manner by some little minister. O sir, I feel the danger of your position, and I always make it a matter of prayer to God that you may be kept humble.

I am exceedingly obliged to the gentleman, but I am sure I could make it a matter of prayer for him that he might be made humble once in his life by way of a change, for he had never yet known what humility was so far as he was personally concerned.

Now you know very well that it is just as easy for a man to be proud in his regs as my lord mayor in his gold chain. There is many a costermonger riding in his little cart, quite as vain as my lord who rides in a gilded coach.

Indeed, I dare say he, the last one, feels very little pride, but very great shame at having to make himself so ridiculous. You may be a king, and yet be humble. You may be a beggar, and yet be proud.

You may be great, and yet little in your own esteem. You may be little, and yet you may be greater in your estimation than those who are the greatest. See to it, then, that your low estate do not make you proud any more than your high estate.

Success, Failure, and Spiritual Experience as Tests of Humility

Again, success often has a very sorrow influence upon humility. The man was humble before his God till God had given him the great victory over the Moabites, but then his heart was lifted up within him, and the Lord forsook him.

When he was little in Israel, he bowed before the Most High. When he became great, he exalted himself. Great success is like a full cup. It is hard to hold it with a steady hand. It is swimming in deep waters, and there is always a fear of being drowned there.

It is standing on the top of the pinnacle of the temple, and Satan often says, Have you not seen the man who could not get a congregation, and who insisted upon it that it was because he was a better preacher than the man who did?

I read sometimes a magazine, the doctrine of which is this. If you want to be a good preacher, you must preach according to the skeletons which are given you in this magazine. There are some who do this, but still find their chapels empty.

Then says the magazine with all complacency, The men that get the congregation are always the weakest men. They are always the men that have the least mental power. While we who have but a few, a mere handful, we are the intellectual people.

The mob always will, they say, run after the foolish men. So that the brother who gets no success comforts himself with this thought, that providence is quite wrong, and that the Christian public are quite mistaken, that he ought to be, if things had been right, the most popular man living, and that it is quite a mistake he is not.

Now want of success has a very great influence on some men to make them feel, Well, if I cannot succeed in getting other people to think me somebody, I will think everybody else nobody, and I will elevate myself above them all in my own opinion.

Now I am speaking some home truths. I have received a deal of advice myself, and I think I may sometimes take the liberty of giving it to others. I hope that those who are always thinking of success as certainly involving pride may also take to themselves the comfortable reflection that their non-success, suggesting as it may very bitter thoughts about their brethren, may also be pride only in another direction.

But then again, long enjoyment of the master's presence has a tendency to make us proud. To walk all day in the sunlight brings us in the danger of a sunstroke. Better not sit too near the fire, or one may get scorched.

If we have nothing but full assurance, we may come to be presumptuous. There is nothing like the heat of summer to breed putrefaction. When you have long-continued joys, fear and tremble for all the goodness of God.

But on the other hand, long-continued doubts will breed pride. When a man has long been doubting his God and mistrusting his promise, what is that but pride? He wants to be somebody and something. He is not willing to believe his God in the dark.

Thinks, in fact, that God deals hardly with him in allowing him to be in despondency at all. He thinks he always ought to have joy and satisfaction. And so it comes to pass that his doubts and fears are as ready parents of pride as assurance could have been.

In fact, to cut short a very long story, for I might go on with these two sides of the question all the evening, there is not a position in the world where a man cannot be humble if he have grace. There is not a station under heaven where a man will not be proud if left to himself.

I pray you, never think that leaving one station and getting into another will be any help to your humility. It is true the peasant boy in the Valley of Humiliation sang, He that is down need fear no fall, he that is low no pride.

He that is humble ever shall have God to be his guide. But I dare say that very same boy was sometimes singing in that very valley songs of despondency, songs of pride and wicked rebellion against his God.

It is not the place, it is the heart. It is not the position, but the grace. That man is as safe on a pinnacle as on a level ground if God hold him up. And he is as much in danger in the valley as he is upon the high place if God be not with him.

If the Lord forsake him, he will fall in either place. If the Lord be with him, he will stand in every position. I have thus hinted at some of the dangers to which humility is exposed. And now, thirdly, some of the arguments by which we ought to be provoked to humility of spirit.

Human Mortality and Sin as Reasons for Humility

First, let us draw some arguments from ourselves. What am I that I should be proud? I am a man, that is to say, a worm, a thing that is and is not. An angel, how much he surpasses me! And yet the Lord charges his angels with folly, and the heavens were not pure in his sight.

How much less, then, should the son of man, a creature full of sin, lift himself up and exalt himself as though he were something. Verily, man at his bestest state is altogether vanity, his life a dream, an empty show.

O vain man, why shouldst thou be proud? Think of our mortality. In a few more years, we shall be worm's meat. Caesar's dust shall be eaten, eaten by the basest of creatures. Take up the skull of some departed one in your hand and say, What had this man to be proud of?

Go to some charnel house and mark the corruption. Look on some body which has been buried but a little while. What a heap of loathsomeness! And yet you and I carry about with us the elements of all that putridity, the food of all that rottenness.

How then dare we be proud? I have at home a picture which is so admirably managed that when you look closely at it, you see two little children in the bloom of youth at play, enjoying each other's company.

If you go some distance from the picture, the outlines get more and more indistinct, and standing some few yards away from it, it turns into death's head, with vacant, empty eyes in the bones of the skull and the jaws, a perfect death's head.

Now this is just ourselves. When we are looking with our poor short sight of time, we look like fair beings that are full of life, but stand at a scriptural distance and view these things, and you soon perceive that we are nothing after all but death's heads.

What right then have we to be proud? Begin not to be proud, man, till thy life is secure, and thou knowest that will never be. Thou bubble, boast not of the many colors thou hast, thou shalt burst directly.

Thou glorious rainbow, exalt not thyself because of thy varied hues. When the sun withdraweth his light or the cloud removeth, thou art gone. O thou fleecy cloud that art so soon to burst on the earth and be dissipated forever, think not of thyself and thy fleecy glories, for thou shalt soon depart and be gone.

Every time your humility gives way and your pride lifts up its head, think that you are mortal, and the skeleton may teach you humility. But there is a yet stranger, yet stronger argument than this. What are you but depraved creatures?

When the child of God is at his best, he is no better than a sinner at his worst, except so far as God has made him to differ. There goes John Bradford, but for the grace of God. Nay, there goes Paul to curse, if not for the grace of God.

There goes Peter to be a Judas, unless Christ shall pray for him that his faith fail not. A sinner saved by grace and yet proud, out on such impudence. God pardon us and deliver us from that evil. But then let us think we are not only depraved so that we are inclined to sin, but we have sinned.

And how can we then be proud? Sinners whose highest deservings are the wrath of God and the hot flames of hell, how can we venture for a single moment to stand as those who had done anything meritorious or could claim anything of our God?

Verily, you and I may stand up today and say, What is man that thou shouldest be mindful of him, or the son of man that thou visitest him? The more we think of ourselves, if guided by God's spirit, the more reasons we shall find for our serving God with all humility.

Christ’s Humility as the Believer’s Pattern

But there are not only reasons in ourselves, there are reasons in Christ. Our master was never exalted above measure. You never detect in him one proud or scornful glance upon the meanest of the mean or the vilest of the vile.

He condescended to men of low estate, but it did not look like condescension in him. He did it in such a way that there was not the appearance of stooping. He was always on their level in his heart. He ate and drank and sat with publicans and sinners, and all in such an easy, happy spirit that no man said of him, See how he stoops!

Everyone felt that stooping was his natural attitude, that he could not stand up and be proud, it would be unbecoming in him. And shall the servant be above his master, or the disciple above his lord?

Ye that are purse-proud, or talent-proud, or beauty-proud, I beseech you, think how unlike you are to the master. There was nothing in him that would keep man back from him, but everything that would draw them to him.

He made himself of no reputation, and took upon himself the form of a servant, and being in fashion as a man, he became obedient unto death, even to the death of the cross. Look at that strange sight, and never be proud again.

There is the God of heaven and earth. With the basin in his hand and the towel on his arm, he is washing his disciples' feet. And here are you and I. Instead of washing other men's feet, we are for having them anoint our heads, and pour on the balmy cordial of a flattering unction, that we may say unto ourselves, I am rich and increased in goods.

For as by that very desire we prove ourselves to be naked and poor and miserable, by the love of Christ, then, let us seek to be humble. There is yet one other source for arguments, though of course there be so many that I could not mention them all, and that is God's goodness towards us, which should make us exceedingly humble.

Election, Grace, and Gratitude

You remember that text which says, Put on, therefore, as the elect of God, bowels of compassion and humbleness of mind. Now I have known some who, believing that they were the elect of God, have put on haughtiness of looks.

You know the school I allude to. Certain gentlemen who are the elect, and nobody can ever come near to them. All the Christian people, if saved, which is a great question with them, will at least be saved so as by fire.

Verily they appear to read the text thus. Put on as the elect of God, pride and self-conceit. Like another text which says, See that ye love one another with a pure heart fervently. Which I think some people read the wrong way upwards and they make it out.

See that ye hate one another with a pure heart fervently. And oh, how fervently they have done it! How fervently they have hated one another! Now the mercy of God in having elected us, the mercy of God in having bought us with the precious blood of Jesus, should tend to keep us very low in the dust of self-abasement.

What was there in you that could merit esteem, or give the Creator delight? What was there in you that Christ should buy you with His precious blood? What in you that you should be made the temple of the Holy Ghost?

What is there in you that you should be brought to heaven? That you should be made to sit down with Abraham and Isaac and Jacob at the right hand of God? What if you have been grafted into the good olive tree?

Remember, you were once branches of the wild olive, and you are now nothing but grass. What if your branch hang down with the weight of its produce? Yet there was a time when it brought forth nothing but the apples of Sodom and the grapes of Gomorrah.

Bless God and thank Him that the root beareth thee, but thou bearest not the root. What hast thou that thou hast not received? Who made thee to differ? Thy very gifts are given thee by electing love. God gave them not because you deserved them, but because He chose to do so.

He has made you a vessel unto honor, chosen you and made you in a fair and goodly mold, made you a fair vase, showing forth the skill of the master. But who made thee? Who made thee? Look back to that clay pit.

Look back to the potter's house, to the fashioning fingers of the revolving wheel, and surely you will say, My God, unto Thee be the praise for what I am, but of Myself I am less than nothing. I am worthless and useless.

Unto Thee be all the glory. I shall now come to my last point, upon which, with excessive brevity, I would speak to Myself. Indeed, I have been all this evening speaking to Myself as much to you. I have now a story suggested to Me.

Practical Humility in Church Service and Ministry

There was an excellent lady who accosted Me one day and told Me that she had always prayed that I might be kept humble. Of course, I was excessively grateful to her, although it was a very usual thing.

So I said to her, But do you not need to pray the same prayer for yourself? Oh, no, said she. There is no necessity. I do not think there is any tendency in Me to be proud. Well, I assured the good lady that I thought it was necessary for her to pray always, for as sure as ever she thought she had no tendency to be proud, that proved at once that she was proud already.