On Christmas Day, both the sermon at St. Paul's,—.a very
able one, preached by the Rev. Aubrey Moore,—and the sermon at Westminster Abbey,—an equally able one, preached by the Dean,—dwelt very appropriately on hmnility as the special lesson of the day. If God humbled himself to raise man, it seems pretty clear that man without humbling himself cannot do the same work ; and so at St. Paul's and at West- minster Abbey alike, the English people were told that the way to subdue the world is not to play the master, but to play the servant, and to play the servant in all earnestness. Humility is a lesson which Englishmen can never have impressed on them too often, especially those Englishmen who have to administer the affairs of a great Empire ; but we are not sure that the great majority of English citizens are not in danger of mistaking the lesson, and thinking that we can only truly serve our fellow- men by resigning as arrogant the attempt to govern them, even where governing them, and governing them strongly, is the only way to serve them. No misconception could be historically less Christian. Both Christ and his Apostles taught explicitly that even the Roman rulers of their time had a great duty to the world to perform, and that they ought not to bear the sword in vain. And if the Roman rulers, with their frequent venality and indifference to justice, were treated as chosen. instruments of the supreme righteousness, it is clear enough that Christian Englishmen may perform a much greater ser- vice than the Romans ever did, in supervising the administra- tion of great tracts of the earth's surface in places where no other just government is even possible. It is the merit of the democratic form of government that the people easily catch the significance of lessons in political humility it is its chief defeci, that the people, in their moral eagerness to apply that lesson, often miss, and miss fatally, its true drift.
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