Page:Poverty and Riches, a sermon.djvu/13

Rh And let us at once say, that by poverty of spirit, we do not intend meanness of spirit: nor by distrust of self, do we imply ignorance of self. If God has given ability, advantage, strength, let God's servant be aware of, and know well, these His gifts, and these entrusted powers. We need never blind our eyes to any of God's facts: and every fact is God's. Unconscious strength, advantage unawares, ability unsuspected by its holder, these are one thing: but strength known and measured, advantage tried and proved, ability exerted by one who is skilled where and how to bestow it, these are another matter, and a far nobler. And the really humble, the poor in spirit in the best and Christian sense, is not the man who is ignorant of himself; not he who depreciates or neglects his powers; but he who, knowing them and using them, "maketh himself poor:" becomes the more modest and self-distrusting, the more he knows, and the more he does: shrinks from the triumph which his own abilities have been permitted to win, not because he stupidly passes them by, or affectedly depreciates them, but because all such their achievements seem to him as nothing, in comparison with that which God made him to do, and which he might do: because too he looks on himself as an instrument in the hand of another; and, while filled with thankfulness for the use which God has deigned to make of him, is eager to be still more and more entirely the means of advancing His work in the world, and