another, and already you are well
down. A humble act done to-day, a humble word spoken to-morrow;
humiliation after humiliation accepted every day that you would at one
time have spurned from you with passion; and then your own vile, hateful,
unbearable heart-all that is ordained of God to bring you down, down to
the dust; and this last, your own heart, will bring you down to the very
depths of hell. And thus, after all your other opportunities and
ordinances of humility are embraced and exhausted, then the plunges, the
depths, the abysses of humility that God will open up in your own heart
will all work in you a meetness for heaven and a ripeness for its glory,
that shall for ever reward you for all that degradation and shame and
self-despair which have been to you the sure way and the only way to
everlasting life.

CHAPTER XXI--MASTER THINK-WELL, THE LATE AND ONLY SON OF OLD MR.
MEDITATION

'As he thinketh in his heart, so is he.'--_A Proverb_.

It was a truly delightful sight to see old Mr. Meditation and his only
son, our little Think-well, out among the woods and hedgerows of a summer
afternoon. Little Think-well was the son of his father's old age. That
dry tree used to say to himself that if ever he was intrusted with a son
of his own, he would make his son his most constant and his most
confidential companion all his days. And so he did. The eleventh of
Deuteronomy had become a greater and greater text to that childless man
as he passed the mid-time of his days. 'Therefore,' he used to say to
himself, as he walked abroad alone, and as other men passed him with
their children at their side--'Therefore ye shall teach them to your
children, speaking of them when thou sittest in thine house, and when
thou walkest by the way, when thou liest down and when thou risest up.
And thou shalt write them upon the doorposts of thine house and upon thy
gates.' And thus it was that, as the little lad grew up, there was no
day of all the seven that he so much numbered and waited for as was that
sacred day on which his father was free to take little Think-well by the
hand and lead him out to talk to him. 'No,' said an Edinburgh boy to his
mother the other day--'No, mother,' he said, 'I have no liking for these
Sunday papers with their poor stories and their pictures. I am to read
the Bible stories and the Bible biographies first.' He is not my boy. I
wish my boys were all like him. 'And Plutarch on week-