The Test of True Greatness | Our Sunday Talks
Inspirational Living: Life Lessons for Success & Happiness
The Living Hour
4.0 • 805 Ratings
🗓️ 28 September 2025
⏱️ 6 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Listen to a sample episode of Our Sunday Talks, edited and adapted from Happiness Road by Alice Hegan Rice, published in 1942. This series has over 200 episodes, and deals with topics related to spirituality. Gain access to more episodes (ad-free) by becoming our patron for as little as $3 a month.
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Podcast Excerpt: Rabindranath Tagore stresses throughout his teachings the necessity of knowing the soul apart from the self. He goes so far as to say that sin is the defeat of your soul by your own sense of Self. Now this Self, which we think we know so well, is really a mysterious thing, beguiling us with its importance, deluding us into the belief that it is the ultimate goal of our desires.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome to New Hour Sunday Talks, an exclusive series for the patrons of the inspirational living podcast. |
| 0:20.0 | Today's talk was edited and adapted from |
| 0:23.4 | Happiness Road by Alice Hagen Rice, |
| 0:27.7 | published in 1942. |
| 0:35.4 | John Ruskin declared that the first step of a truly great person is their humility. |
| 0:42.7 | But by humility, Ruskin did not mean a supine acceptance of good and evil alike. |
| 0:49.3 | Although Jesus of Nazareth, the most humble of all people, was capable of anger and strong language, |
| 0:56.0 | given to passionate repudiation of wrong, indignant at injustice, intolerant of hypocrisy, |
| 1:04.0 | rebellious against inequalities, he could nevertheless say to his disciples, |
| 1:13.0 | Why do you call me good? |
| 1:15.6 | There is none good but one. |
| 1:17.4 | That is God. |
| 1:23.5 | Before the time of Christ, the word humility was a term of contempt. |
| 1:27.4 | To be humble meant being weak or cowardly, just as meekness still carries with it a cringing |
| 1:31.3 | connotation. |
| 1:33.3 | Humility suggested having a poor opinion of oneself, an attitude considered absurd until Christ came |
| 1:41.3 | to prove otherwise. |
| 1:43.3 | Throughout the Gospels, the new meaning of the word was |
| 1:46.8 | accepted, and humility came to be regarded as, quote, the sweet root from which all heavenly |
| 1:54.1 | virtues shoot. It presupposed a life of inner simplicity, one that reckoned worth not by material standards, |
| 2:04.0 | but by its intrinsic value. Intellectuality combined with arrogance is one of the deadliest |
| 2:12.7 | hindrances to humility. There are many mental giants who are spiritual illiputians. Nothing can so obstruct a person's |
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