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, and
thrust aside to make way for others. We should be willing to put
others in the way of doing that which we might have got reputation for
by doing ourselves. This was the temper of our Master--this is the
meek and the quiet spirit, and this is the temper of the humble with
whom the High and Lofty One dwells.

The other class of those who are truly great are the contrite in
spirit. At first sight it might be supposed that there must ever be a
vast distinction between the innocent and the penitent. It was so that
the elder son in the parable thought when he saw his brother restored
to his father's favour. He was surp