r if it would be very reasonable for a
moth that flits about the light, or a gnat that dances its hour in the
sunbeam, to be proud because it had longer wings, or prettier markings
on them, than some of its fellows? Is it much more reasonable for us to
plume ourselves on, and set much store by, anything that we are or have
done? Two or three plain questions, to which the answers are quite as
plain, ought to rip up this swollen bladder of self-esteem which we are
all apt to blow. 'What hast thou that thou hast not received?' Where did
you get it? How came you by it? How long is it going to last? Is it such
a very big thing after all? You have written a book; you are clever as
an operator, an experimenter; you are a successful student. You have
made a pile of money; you have been prosperous in your earthly career,
and can afford to look upon men that are failures and beneath you in
social position with a smile of pity or of contempt, as the case may be.
Well! I suppose the distance to the nearest fixed star is pretty much
the same from the top of one ant-hill in a wood as from the top of the
next one, though the one may be a foot higher than the other. I suppose
that we have all come out of nothing, and are anything, simply because
God is everything. If He were to withhold His upholding and inbreathing
power from any of us for one moment, we should shrivel into nothingness
like a piece of paper calcined in the fire, and go back into that
vacuity out of which His fiat, and His fiat alone, called us. And yet
here we are, setting great store, some of us, by our qualities or
belongings, and thinking ever so much of ourselves because we possess
them, and all the while we are but great emptinesses; and the things of
which we are so proud are what God has poured into us.

You think that is all commonplace. Bring it into your lives, brethren;
apply it to your estimate of yourselves, and your expectations from
other people, and you will be delivered from a large part of the
annoyances and the miseries of your present.

But the deepest reason for a habitual and fixed lowly opinion of
ourselves lies in a sadder fact. We are not only recipient
nothingnesses; we have something that is our own, and that is our will,
and we have lifted it up against God. And if a man's position as a
dependent creature should take all lofty looks and high spirit out of
him, his condition as a sinful man before God should lay him flat on his
face in the