s my comprehension! How
a spark of pride can live in such a hell as every human heart is would be
past belief, did we not know that God avenges sin by more sin; avenges
Himself on a wicked and a false heart by more wickedness and more
falsehood, all ending in Satanic pride.

Too long as I have kept you in this valley to-night, I dare not let you
out of it till I have shared with you a few sentences on evangelical
humiliation out of that other so subtle and devout man, Jonathan Edwards.
But what special kind of humiliation is evangelical humiliation? you will
ask. Hear, then, what this master in Israel says. "Evangelical
humiliation is the sense that a Christian man has of his own utter
insufficiency, utter despicableness, and utter odiousness; with an always
answerable frame of heart. This humiliation is peculiar to the true
saints. It arises from the special influence of the Spirit of God
implanting and exercising supernatural and divine principles; and it is
accompanied with a sense of the transcendent beauty of divine things.
And, thus, God's true saints all more or less see their own odiousness on
account of sin, and the exceedingly hateful nature of all sin. The very
essence of evangelical humiliation consists in such humility as becomes a
man in himself exceeding sinful but now under a dispensation of grace. It
consists in a mean esteem of himself, as in himself nothing, and
altogether contemptible and odious. This, indeed, is the greatest and
the most essential thing in true religion." And so on through a whole
chapter of beaten gold. To which noble chapter I shall only add that
such teaching is as sweet, as strengthening, and as reassuring to the
truly Christian heart as it is bitter and hateful to the counterfeit
heart.

OLD HONEST

"An honest heart."--_Our Lord_.

Next tell them of Old Honest, who you found
With his white hairs treading the pilgrim's ground;
Yea, tell them how plain-hearted this man was,
How after his good Lord he bare his cross:
Perhaps with some grey head this may prevail,
With Christ to fall in love, and sin bewail.

You would have said that no pilgrim to the Celestial City could possibly
have come from a worse place, or a more unlikely place, than was that
place from which Christian and Christiana and Matthew and Mercy had come.
And yet so it was. For Old Honest, this most excellent and every way
most delightful old saint, hailed from a far le