cheerful efforts for their success? or, what was a greater effort still, when the preferred plans turned out in their result to be better than your own, have you candidly and graciously acknowledged that this was the case?

Again, when conscious that you have acted or spoken as you ought not to have done, have you frankly confessed your fault to the aggrieved person? This acknowledgment is of course more difficult when you know that those to whom it must be made will not have the refinement to receive your acknowledgment kindly and courteously; that they will, on the contrary, remind you of every aggravating circumstance of the case; that they will often afterwards taunt you with having yourself confessed that you were in the wrong. There are many occasions when such expected consequences would make a confession really inexpedient. This must be left to your own conscience to

decide; but you should carefully examine whether your reluctance to confess arises from the apprehension of a wound to your pride, or from the social disadvantages of recurrence to a mutually irritating subject; but why should it be mutually irritating? If you place the fault you have committed in its true light before your own eyes, you will acknowledge that it deserves probably more blame than any one else. can attach to it, for you can see (if you will) many aggravating circumstances of wilfulness, of neglected warnings, of broken resolutions, that impress upon it all the characters of deliberate sin. In any fault you commit this day, are they the extenuating or the aggravating circumstances you consider most? If the former, your pride will be severely wounded at the view taken of your conduct by others, and your daily discipline will then make you doubly unhappy, as you cannot but feel anger towards those who, you

fancy, have unfairly exaggerated your fault.

Again, has it been a part of your "daily cross" to witness your opinion disregarded, your comfort neglected, your interests forgotten? Pride is acutely sensitive, and therefore it will be apt to fancy such trials when they have no real existence. But if you should have just grounds of complaint, why does it cause this extent of unhappiness? Because pride forms extravagant expectations; because pride expects that its opinions should be the first regarded, its comforts the first considered, its interests those to which all others must yield. The meek and lowly in heart form no such expectations; therefore their daily discipline, when it comes in the form of neglect, wounds slightly, if it wounds at all. Tears may be drawn from their eyes, but no bitterness rests in their hearts; sorrow may exist without pain, but pain and sin are inseparable.

F

Again, do you willingly pay the respect that is due to different stations in life; or is it a part of your daily trials to be reminded that there are many stations in life above your own? It is no proof of the non-existence of pride to associate courteously and kindly with inferiors: it is in association with superiors that the Christian principle of the naturally proud heart is really tested. If it gives you pain to yield the deference to high position enjoined by the Word of God, that pain is caused by sin. This is, in truth, a subject that requires careful self-examination and anxious watchfulness. In your feelings relating to it, the pride of . heart will often assume very deceitful forms, and assail you with very subtle temptations. When those in high places are treated with neglect and spoken of with disparagement, while their inferiors are treated with deference and their position unduly exalted, such conduct may

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wear the semblance of disinterestedness and independence of mind; but in most cases the influential feeling is a weak and a wicked one. It is the meanness of jealousy; one of the various phases of pride. Those only prove themselves superior to the jealousy of rank and position who pay them the due respect their symbolical nature deserves; and those who view social inequality as a necessity impressed by God on the universal constitution of things, will acknowledge His directing hand by the cheerful recognition of its existence and its advantages. The elevated and refined mind that attaches the chief, if not the only, interest to those higher distinctions, of which external honours are but the type, will always be ready to offer due deference to a species of superiority towards which, personally, comparative indifference is felt, though its relative utility may be fully appreciated.