Holiness Imperfect in the Best Men

Spurgeon, Charles Haddon

Job 15:14-16

What is man, that he should be clean? and he which is born of a woman, that he should be righteous?…

Archbishop Usher was once asked to write a treatise upon sanctification; this he promised to do, but six months rolled away and the good Archbishop had not written a sentence. He said to a friend, "I have not begun the treatise, yet I cannot confess to a breach of my promise, for to tell you the truth I have done my best to write upon the subject; but when I came to look into my own heart I saw so little of sanctification there, and found that so much which I could have written would have been merely by rote as a parrot might have talked, that I had not the face to write it." Yet if ever there was a man renowned for holiness it was Archbishop Usher; if ever there was a saintly man who seemed to be one of the seraphic spirits permitted to stray beyond the companionship of his kind among poor earthworms here, it was Usher, yet this is the confession he makes concerning himself. Where, then, shall we hide our diminished heads?

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