, or cringing to others. To realize one's own gift, one's
own relation to God, gives to each man a dignity, a power to stand
upright and face the world. The sovereign Master and Giver has given
me my own life and my own gifts. He is responsible for the existence
which He gave me, and I am not to shame Him by shrinking from making
the best of it. But also humility is, in all relations, truth about
ourselves. It is truth about ourselves as regards God, who {112} is
simply the giver of whatever we have and are; and it is truth about
ourselves as regards our fellow men--our own gifts being justly
appraised only when they are regarded as means of serving the body as a
whole, without any self-aggrandizement, with a due respect to the gifts
of others, and even a positive will to let them have higher place than
ourselves.

Indeed we shall do well to meditate deeply on this. What good work is
there which is not in more or less continual danger of suffering, or
even being abandoned, because fellow Christians, zealous fellow
Christians, will plainly, and it must be wilfully, yield to the
ambition to be first: will not be content to be second or third: will
not do the unobtrusive work: will think 'How can I shine,' rather than
'How can I serve'? In fact, how very unwilling we are to recognize, in
our ideals of education, and in our theory of grown life, that
ambition, in the strict sense of the word--the desire to obtain
distinction for ourselves, as distinct from the desire to serve--is not
a motive which Christianity can sanction, or from which it can hope for
a blessing.

We linger lovingly, wistfully, on the picture of the corporate life of
a Christian community. Has it vanished from the earth, this real
fraternal {113} living, 'high and low, rich and poor, one with
another,' each supplementing the deficiencies of the other, and
receiving of their fullness? May we not do something more than we are
doing to realize it in our congregations or parishes? Is nearly enough
emphasis laid on the _social_ relationship of each congregation of
fellow worshippers or each local church?

Dimly through the mist of ages in old churchwardens' accounts, in the
rare instances where they have been preserved from days before the
Reformation, we discern what a really fraternal, self-governing and
mutually co-operative community the mediaeval English parish was. Let
me extract a few sentences from the excellent preface[12] which Bishop