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The Communion Service from the Book of Common Prayer
With Select Readings from the Writings of the Rev. F. D. Maurice, M.A.

Edited by the Right Rev. John William Colenso, D.D.
Lord Bishop of Natal.

London: Macmillan and Co., 1874.

Transcribed by Charles Wohlers, 2006.


(11.) HUMILITY.

REBELLION against a perfect Will,--which has been manifesting itself in acts of love to all creatures, which has been exhibiting its power, its redeeming power, over them, and through them, and in them,--has been the misery of Jew as well as Gentile. This has been the cause of the blindness, the incapacity of discerning that Will, which has come upon both. Simple submission, an entire surrender of man's self to God, is that reasonable sacrifice, by which the man puts himself in the right state, claims his true relation, acquires the capacity of seeing that, which had been hidden from him, or inverted.

Offering up that sacrifice, there would be no more that self-exaltation, that boasting of one above another, which is the destruction of Christian fellowship. With that sacrifice begins the faithful performance of all assigned tasks and offices--the knowledge on the part of each man of what he is--the cheerful doing of his own work as God's work, without intruding upon the work of his brother. Humility in this. sense becomes, not an ornamental virtue of the individual, but a necessary condition of his place in the commonwealth. Out of it flow all other graces, zeal, fervency, hope, patience, prayer, hospitality, forgiveness of persecutors, sympathy, the abandonment of vengeance to God, the effort to subdue the evil of an enemy by good.--Unity of the New Testament, p. 389.


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