art.

3. But I have as many students of one kind or other here to-night as I
have maid-servants, and they will remember where a great student has said
that knowledge without love but puffeth a student up. Now, the best
knowledge for us all, and especially so for a student, is to know
himself: his own ignorance, his own foolishness, his blindness of mind,
and, especially, his corruption of heart. For that knowledge will both
keep him from being puffed up with what he already knows, and it will
also put him and keep him in the way of knowing more. Self-knowledge
will increase humility, and all the past masters both of science and of
religion will tell him that humility is the certain note of the true
student. You who are students all know _The Advancement of Learning_,
just as the servants sitting beside you all know the second chapter of
First Peter. Well, your master Verulam there tells you, and indeed on
every page of his, that it is only to a humble, waiting, childlike temper
that nature, like grace, will ever reveal up her secrets. 'There is
small chance of truth at the goal when there is not a childlike humility
at the starting-post.' Well, then, all you students who would fain get
to the goal of science, make the Church of Christ your starting-post.
Come first and come continually to the Christian school to learn
humility, and then, as long as your talents, your years, and your
opportunities hold out, both truth and goodness will open up to you at
every step. Every step will be a goal, and at every goal a new step will
open up. And God's smile and God's blessing, and all good men's love and
honour and applause will support and reward you in your race. And,
humble-minded to the truth herself, be, at the same time, humble-minded
toward all who like yourself are seeking to know and to do the truth. A
lately deceased student of nature was a pattern to all students as long
as he waited on truth in his laboratory; and even as long as he remained
at his desk to tell the world what he and other students had discovered
in their search. But when any other student in his search after truth
was compelled to cross that hitherto so exemplary student, he immediately
became as insolent as if he had been the greatest boor in the country.
Till, as he spat out scorn at all who differed from him we always
remembered this in A Kempis--'Surely, an humble husbandman that serveth
God is better than a proud philosopher that, ne