2. Another sense, in which we should become as little children, is in the imitation of their humility. This is the temper more immediately recommended in the context, because it is the direct reverse of that which led the disciples to dispute about pre-eminence, and to ask their Lord an unimportant and vain question. Whatever seeds of pride lurk in the nature of infants, yet such is their imbecility of constitution, that, for want of power to exert themselves, they are rather patterns of humility; but more especially, if such little children as our Lord referred to, are partakers of the grace of God. Pride shews itself in forms of various nature. Elation of heart, when the sun of worldly prosperity shines, and proportionable depression and pusillanimity, when the scene shifts to the gloom of adversity—envy at another man’s good fortune, and repining at our own—impatience of reproof, and a quick and acrimonious resentment of injuries—an overweening desire to grasp at worldly things, only to feed and pamper a worldly mind—a violent promptitude to boast of personal endowments, to the depreciating of others, and the aggrandizing of SELF, that darling idol of an unhumbled heart—are all pride, that hydra with many heads, shewing itself in these and various other ways impossible to be enumerated. But, to be humble, look at the infant lulled to rest in his mother’s arms, or the child taken up with the objects of his puerile amusement, dead to the broils of the contentious, and to all the ambitious pursuits of the proud: the former, anxious only for that nutriment, which, when received, operates as a pleasing opiate to its senses; the latter extending his solicitude and ambition only to some little matter, which it costs no care or expense to possess, leaving sceptres, titles, riches, and honors, to those who exert all their subtlety and all their pride to procure them. To be thus easy, like a little child, about worldly pre-eminence, and to be solicitous only, or primarily, about the honor that cometh from God, is the privilege of a Christian, and a mark of conversion. And why should infatuated mortals indulge a contrary temper, when, “before honor is humility;” but especially when it is considered that the loftiest head must be laid low in the grave, and that “dust to dust” will conclude the noblest song of earth. If you disdain to learn humility from a little child, yet take as your pattern that illustrious example of condescension, the holy child Jesus, who for us men and for our salvation exchanged the glory of the heaven of heavens for a manger and a cross.