but, if I were, I feel sure I would come home from the court a far
humbler man than I went up to it. I cannot imagine how a judge can
remain a proud man, or an advocate, or a witness, or a juryman, or a
spectator, or even a policeman. I am never in a criminal court that I do
not tremble with terror all the time. I say to myself all the
time,--there stands John Newton but for the preventing grace of God. 'I
will not sit as a judge to try General Boulanger, because I hate him,'
said M. Renault in the French Senate. Mr. Humble himself could not have
made a better speech to the bench than that when his name was called to
be sworn. Let us all remember John Newton and M. Renault when we would
begin to write or to speak about any arrested, accused, found-out man.
Let other men's arrests, humiliations, accusations, and sentences only
make us search well our own past, and that will make us ever humbler and
ever humbler men ourselves; ever more penitent men, and ever more
prayerful men.

2. And then Miss Humble-mind, his only daughter, was a servant-maid.
There is no office so humble but that a humble mind will not put on still
more humility in it. What a lesson in humility, not Peter only got that
night in the upper room, but that happy servant-maid also who brought in
the bason and the towel. Would she ever after that night grumble and
give up her place in a passion because she had been asked to do what was
beneath her to do? Would she ever leave that house for any wages? Would
she ever see that bason without kissing it? Would that towel not be a
holy thing ever after in her proud eyes? How happy that house would ever
after that night be, not so much because the Lord's Supper had been
instituted in it, as because a servant was in it who had learned humility
as she went about the house that night. Let all our servants hold up
their heads and magnify their office. Their Master was once a servant,
and He left us all, and all servants especially, an example that they
should follow in His steps. Peter, whose feet were washed that night,
never forgot that night, and his warm heart always warmed to a servant
when he saw her with her bason and her towels, till he gave her half a
chapter to herself in his splendid First Epistle. 'Servants, be
subject,' he said, till his argument rose to a height above which not
even Paul himself ever rose. Servant-maids, you must all have your own
half-chapter out of First Peter by he