unqualified phrase over the whole race of Adam. So far as we are sinners we are all under a curse, all children of wrath; and no man is supposed to be so virtuous as that he cannot {233} honestly join in the humble response of the Litany, _Lord have mercy on us, miserable offenders!_ These words repeated constantly in the weekly or daily service of a whole Church should alone be sufficient to prove how much more the virtue of humility is stamped, so to speak, into the Christian soul, than it was into the Hellenic. One cannot imagine either Socrates or Pericles using any such strong language. And I must confess, when coming out into the fresh air from the long Morning Service of the Anglican Church, I have often wondered how far the humble prostration of soul expressed in the refrain of the Litany had been cordially repeated by the great majority of the worshippers. The English, as is well known, are a peculiarly proud and often somewhat insolent people; and for myself, I honestly confess that I have always experienced in reference to my own feelings not a little exaggeration in the expressions of soul-prostration employed whether in the spoken Presbyterian or in the printed Episcopalian formularies. I do not see why Christian worshippers should so constantly avoid the language of a reasonable virtuous self-satisfaction used by King David in not a few places, and by Nehemiah. But however this be, and allowing that many Christians habitually employ phrases in their church service which are plainly at variance with the whole tone and temper of their lives, it is after all true that Christianity, if it errs here, errs on the safe side, and errs only as the medical men do, by using a very drastic drug to combat a very violent disease. For it is only too obvious that self-importance in various forms, not rarely under the decent mask of modesty and diffidence, {234} is the dominant vice of the human character. Young men are apt to glory in their strength, young women in their beauty, fathers are proud of their offspring, scholars of their learning, metaphysicians of their subtleties, and poets of the iridescent and evanescent bubbles of a luxurious fancy and an unpruned imagination. Men of science too are apt to be proud of their knowledge,--whether a knowledge of what is high or what is low matters not; it is the knowledge which puffs them up, not the thing known, which indeed, if well weighed, were oftener the motive to humiliation than to exaltation. We are therefore much in need of getting as much humility from the gospel as it is naturally calculated to inspire; and it may be observed that the public pulse is always ready to beat in unison with the sacred text whenever a man of great original genius stands forward, signally marked with the peculiarly Christian type of humility. Such a man was Michael Faraday, the subtle investigator of those secret laws which regulate the molecular action of particles of matter among themselves.