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“Is it wrong, the wish to be great?” asks young Willie of his father in George MacDonald’s poem “Willie’s Question. ” The following two stanzas are taken from the end of the poem and summarize the father’s response:
“The Man Who was Lord of fate,
Born in an ox’s stall,
Was great because He was much too great
To care about greatness at all. . . .


“You long to be great; you try;
You feel yourself smaller still;
In the name of God let ambition die;
Let Him make you what He will.”
These stanzas are quoted in the book Royal Insignia, compiled by Edwin and Lillian Harvey, In the same reading, entitled “Disdaining Praise,” the authors have included a quotation by John Elliot, an early settler who became a missionary to the Indians:
“I am come to a conclusion to look for no great matters in the world, but to know Jesus Christ and Him crucified. I make best way in a low gale. A high spirit and a high sail together will be dangerous, and therefore I prepare to live low. I desire not much; I pray against it. My study is my calling, so much as to attend that without distraction. . . . By my secluded retirement I have advantages to observe how every day’s occasions insensibly wear off the heart from God and bury it in itself, which they that ever live in the noise and lumber of the world cannot be sensible of.”
Royal Insignia is published by Harvey Christian Publishers and is available in their online Christian Bookstore.

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