to us from the Latin root
_humus_, which means the earth or the ground. Humility, therefore, is
that in the mind and in the heart of a man which is low down even to the
very earth. A humble-minded man may not have learning enough to know the
etymology of the name which best describes his character, but the divine
nature which is in him teaches him to look down, to walk meekly and
softly, and to speak seldom, and always in love. For humility, while it
takes its lowly name from earth, all the time has its true nature from
heaven. Humility is full of all meekness, modesty, submissiveness,
teachableness, sense of inability, sense of unworthiness, sense of ill-
desert. Till, with that new depth and new intensity that the Scriptures
and religious experience have given to this word, as to so many other
words, humility, in the vocabulary of the spiritual life, has come to be
applied to that low estimate of ourselves which we come to form and to
entertain as we are more and more enlightened about God and about
ourselves; about the majesty, glory, holiness, beauty, and blessedness of
the divine nature, and about our own unspeakable evil, vileness, and
misery as sinners. And, till humility has come to rank in Holy
Scripture, and in the lives and devotions of all God's saints, as at once
the deepest root and the ripest fruit of all the divine graces that enter
into, and, indeed, constitute the life of God in the heart of man.
Humility, evangelical humility, sings Edwards in his superb and seraphic
poem the _Religious Affections_,--evangelical humility is the sense that
the true Christian has of his own utter insufficiency, despicableness,
and odiousness, a sense which is peculiar to the true saint. But to
compensate the true saint for this sight and sense of himself, he has
revealed to him an accompanying sense of the absolutely transcendent
beauty of the divine nature and of all divine things; a sight and a sense
that quite overcome the heart and change to holiness all the dispositions
and inclinations and affections of the heart. The essence of evangelical
humility, says Edwards, consists in such humility as becomes a creature
in himself exceeding sinful, but at the same time, under a dispensation
of grace, and this is the greatest and most essential thing in all true
religion.

1. Well, then, our Mr. Humble was a juryman in Mansoul, and his name and
his nature eminently fitted him for his office. I never was a juryman;