Richard Steele on Humility

Humility will make you easy and contented in every condition of life; you will then be ready to commanded; easy to be pleased; hard to be provoked; and generally beloved. An humble mind thinks every good it receieves more than it deserves, and every evil less. It will not think itself too great or too good to stoop to the meanest services of an honest employment; nor be wanting in a modest and respectful behaviour to others. You will not then be disputing when you should obey; fretting when you should submit; envying those you should respect, or contemning those you should embrace. These are a consequence of pride in the heart; a disposition that will make you hateful to God, disrespected of men, and uneasy to yourselves; every labour will be thought too much, every reproof too galling, and every week a year, until the time of servitude expires, and then you will carry your chain with you, for what liberty can he have that is a slave to his pride and passions?

Richard Steele on being upright

"A single Christ is enough for a single heart; hence holy David prayed in

Psalm 86:11: “Unite my heart to fear thy name.” That is, “Let me have but one

heart and mind, and let that be Thine.”

As there are thousands of beams and rays, yet they all meet and center in the

sun. So an upright man, though he has a thousand thoughts, yet they all (by his

good will) meet in God. He has many subordinate ends—to procure a

livelihood, to preserve his credit, to provide for his children—but he has no

supreme end but God alone. Hence he has that steadiness in his resolutions,

that undistractedness in his holy duties, that consistency in his actions, and that

evenness in the frame of his heart, which miserable hypocrites cannot attain..."

Richard Steele

Richard Steele on being upright

"An upright saint is like an apple with rotten specks, but a hypocrite is like the apple with a rotten core. The sincere Christian has a speck of passion here, there one of worldliness, and there one of pride. But cut him up and anatomize him, and he is sound at heart; there Christ and Christianity live and reign…Though his hand cannot do all that God bids, yet his heart is sincere in all he does. His soul is bent for perfect purity, and so he has his name from that. “Blessed are the pure in heart” (Mat 5:8). In his words he sometimes fails and also in his thoughts and deeds. But open his heart, and there is a love, a desire, a design, and an endeavor after real and absolute purity. He is not legally pure, that is, free from all sin; but he is evangelically pure, free from the reign of all sin." Richard Steele