hese burdens seem heavy, as the master's demand of service in the house
seemed heavy to the servant when he returned weary and hungry from field
labour; but although we should bear them all with complete uncomplaining
alacrity, we should acquire thereby no right to reward.

There is absolutely no such thing as a surplus of merit in man. The
imagination of it has ever been rife in man-made religions, as weeds
spring thick and spontaneous from the ground; but never and nowhere is
there any substantial foundation for this human conceit. It springs in
the deepest ignorance, and it withers when the light of knowledge begins
to shine. It rests on an entire misapprehension of the relations between
God and man. If a man on ship-board, thinking that the ship was about to
sink, on account of being too heavily loaded, should grasp the shrouds,
and hang on them with all his weight, by way of lightening the ship, the
bystanders would count him fatuous; and yet such is the folly of him
who, getting all from God, imagines that he has conferred on God a
favour by a surplus of goodness. I have seen grown people, in possession
of all their faculties, able to read, if not further educated, when, in
crossing a river by a ferry, they apprehended danger, applying both
their hands to the side of the boat in which they stood, and, pushing
with all their might, in order to push it towards a place of safety.
This implies the grossest ignorance, or at least the total forgetfulness
for the time of the most obvious and ordinary of the natural laws; and
yet I have found that these persons had quite enough of wit to manage
all their ordinary affairs, and to get along respectably in society. I
think there is some analogy between this case and the case of those who,
intelligent on other points, yet blindly imagine that they merit praise
for not squandering God's gifts that have been placed under their care.

"When ye have done all, say, We are unprofitable servants"--servants
whom the master did not need, and who contribute nothing to him. The
question whether the Lord conceded that in point of fact any man ever
does perfectly perform all his duty is out of place here; The Lord's
meaning is, even although a man should do all, he would still be
destitute of merit before God; much more are those destitute of merit
who come far short of perfection, and to this class belong all, even the
best of the children of men.

Means and opportunities of bearing evi