people
would say that this summary of the divine requirements is defective,
because there is nothing in it about a man's duty to himself, which is
as much a duty as his duty to his fellows, or his duty to God. But there
is a good deal of my duty to myself crowded into that one word,
'humbly.' For I suppose we might almost say that the basis of all our
obligations to our own selves lies in this, that we shall take the right
view--that is, the lowly view--of ourselves. But I pass that.

'To walk humbly with thy God.' 'Can two walk together unless they be
agreed?' For walking with God there must be communion, based in love,
and resulting in imitation. And that communion must be constant, and run
through all the life, like a golden thread through some web. So, then,
here is the minimum of the divine requirements, to give everybody what
he has a right to, including the mercy to which he has a right, to have
a lowly estimate of myself, and to live continually grasping the hand of
God, and conscious of His overshadowing wing at all moments, and of
conformity to His will at every step of the road. That is the minimum;
and the people who so glibly say, 'That is my religion,' have little
consciousness of how far-reaching and how deep-down-going the
requirements of this text are. The requirements result from the very
nature of God, and our relation to Him, and they are endorsed by our own
consciences, for we all know that these, and nothing less than these are
the duties that we owe to God. So much for God's requirements.

II. Our failure.

There is not one of us that has come up to the standard. Man after man
may be conceived of as bringing in his hands the actions of his life,
and laying them in the awful scales which God's hand holds. In the one
are God's requirements, in the other my life; and in every case down
goes the weight, and 'weighed in the balances we are altogether lighter
than vanity.' We stand before the great Master in the school, and one by
one we take up our copybooks; and there is not one of them that is not
black with blots and erasures and swarming with errors. The great cliff
stands in front of us with the victor's prize on its topmost ledge, and
man after man tries to climb, and falls bruised and broken at the base.
'There is none righteous, no, not one.' Micah's requirements come to
every man that will honestly take stock of his life and his character as
the statement of an unreached and unreachable ide