glecting himself,
laboureth to understand the course of the heavens. It is great wisdom
and perfection to esteem nothing of ourselves, and to think always well
and highly of others.' Students of arts, students of philosophy,
students of law, students of medicine, and especially, students of
divinity, be humble men. Labour in humility even more than in your
special science. Humility will advance you in your special science;
while, all the time, and at the end of time, she will be more to you than
all the other sciences taken together. And since I have spoken of A
Kempis, take this motto for all your life out of A Kempis, as the great
and good Fenelon did, and it will guide you to the goal: _Ama nescia et
pro nihilo reputari_.

4. But of all the men in the whole world it is ministers who should
simply, as Peter says, be clothed with humility, and that from head to
foot. And, first as divinity students, and then as pastors and
preachers, we who are ministers have advantages and opportunities in this
respect quite peculiar and private to ourselves. For, while other
students are spending their days and their nights on the ancient classics
of Greece and Rome, the student who is to be a minister is buried in the
Psalms, in the Gospels, and in the Epistles. While the student of law is
deep in his commentaries and his cases, the student of divinity is deep
in the study of experimental religion. And while the medical student is
full of the diseases of animals and of men, the theological student is
absorbed in the holiness of the divine nature, and in the plague of the
human heart, and, especially, he is drowned deeper every day in his own.
And he who has begun a curriculum like that and is not already putting on
a humility beyond all other men had better lose no more time, but turn
himself at once to some other way of making his bread. The word of God
and his own heart,--yes; what a sure school of evangelical humility to
every evangelically-minded student is that! And, then, after that, and
all his days, his congregational communion-roll and his visiting-book.
Let no minister who would be found of God clothed and canopied over with
humility ever lose sight of his communion-roll and pastoral visitation-
book. I defy any minister to keep those records always open before him
and yet remain a proud man, a self-respecting, self-satisfied,
self-righteous man. For, what secret histories of his own folly,
neglect, rashness,