5. "She loves them most that think best of her." But, surely, surely,
the guide goes quite too far in blaming and being hard upon poor Madam
Bubble for that? For, to give her fair play, she is not at all alone in
that. Is the guide himself wholly above that? Do we not all do that? Is
there one in ten, is there one in a thousand, who hates and humiliates
himself because his love of men and women goes up or down just as they
think of him? Yes; Greatheart is true to his great name in his whole
portrait of Madam Bubble also, and nowhere more true than in this present
feature. For when any man comes to have any true greatness in his
heart--how he despises and detests himself as he finds himself out in not
only claiming kindred and acquaintance with the rich and despising and
denying the poor; but, still more, in loving or hating other men just as
they love or hate him! The world loves her own. Yes; but he who has
been taken out of the world, and who has had the world taken out of him,
he loves--he strives to love, he goes to his knees every day he lives to
love--those who not only do not think well of him, but who both think ill
of him and speak ill of him. "Humility," says William Law, "does not
consist in having a worse opinion of ourselves than we deserve, or in
abasing ourselves lower than we really are. But as all virtue is founded
in truth, so humility is founded in a true and just sense of our
weakness, misery, and sin. He who rightly feels and lives in this sense
of his condition lives in humility. And, it may be added, when our
hearts are wholly clothed with humility we shall be prompt to approve the
judgment and to endorse the sentence of those who think and speak the
least good of us and the most evil."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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