Covetousness or avarice makes, not sensual gratification itself, but the things that may minister thereto, the object of pursuit, and in this last chase often loses sight of its original aim. Ambition is selfish love of power; vanity is selfish love of esteem. Pride is but the self-complacency, self-sufficiency, and self-isolation of a selfish spirit that desires nothing so much as unrestrained independence. Falsehood originates in selfishness, first as self-deception, and then, since man by sin isolates himself and yet in a thousand ways needs the fellowship of his brethren, as deception of others. Malice, the perversion of natural resentment (together with hatred and revenge), is the reaction of selfishness against those who stand, or are imagined to stand, in its way. Unbelief and enmity to God are effects of sin, rather than its essence; selfishness leads us first to doubt, and then to hate, the Lawgiver and Judge. Tacitus: “Humani generis proprium est odisse quem læseris.” In sin, self-affirmation and self-surrender are not coördinate elements, as Dorner holds, but the former conditions the latter.
As love to God is love to God's holiness, so love to man is love for holiness in man and desire to impart it. In other words, true love for man is the longing to make man like God. Over against this normal desire which should fill the heart and inspire the life, there stands a hierarchy of lower desires which may be utilized and sanctified by the higher love, but which may assert their independence and may thus be the occasions of sin. Physical gratification, money, esteem, power, knowledge, family, virtue, are proper objects of regard, so long as these are sought for God's sake and within the limitations of his will. Sin consists in turning our backs on God and in seeking any one of these objects for its own sake; or, which is the same thing, for our own sake. Appetite gratified without regard to God's law is lust; the love of money becomes avarice; the desire for esteem becomes vanity; the longing for power becomes ambition; the love for knowledge becomes a selfish thirst for intellectual satisfaction; parental affection degenerates into indulgence and nepotism; the seeking of virtue becomes self-righteousness and self-sufficiency. Kaftan, Dogmatik, 323—“Jesus grants that even the heathen and sinners love those who love them. But family love becomes family pride; patriotism comes to stand for country right or wrong; happiness in one's calling leads to class distinctions.”
Dante, in his Divine Comedy, divides the Inferno into three great sections: those in which are punished, respectively, incontinence, bestiality, and malice. Incontinence—sin of the heart, the emotions, the affections. Lower down is found bestiality—sin of the head, the thoughts, the mind, as infidelity and heresy. Lowest of all is malice—sin of the will, deliberate rebellion, fraud and treachery. So we are taught that the heart carries the intellect with it, and that the sin of unbelief gradually deepens into the intensity of malice. See A. H. Strong, Great Poets and their Theology, 133—“Dante teaches us that sin is the self-perversion of the will. If there is any thought fundamental to his system, it is the thought of freedom. Man is not a waif swept irresistibly downward on the current; he is a being endowed with power to resist, and therefore guilty if he yields. Sin is not misfortune, or disease, or natural necessity; it is wilfulness, and crime, and self-destruction. The Divine Comedy is, beyond all other poems, the poem of conscience; and this could not be, if it did not recognize man as a free agent, the responsible cause of his own evil acts and his own evil state.” See also Harris, in Jour. Spec. Philos., 21:350-451; Dinsmore, Atonement in Literature and Life, 69-86.
In Greek tragedy, says Prof. Wm. Arnold Stevens, the one sin which the gods hated and would not pardon was ὕβρις—obstinate self-assertion of mind or will, absence of reverence and humility—of which we have an illustration in Ajax. George MacDonald: “A man may be possessed of himself, as of a devil.” Shakespeare depicts this insolence of infatuation in Shylock, Macbeth, and Richard III. Troilus and Cressida, [pg 570]4:4—“Something may be done that we will not; And sometimes we are devils to ourselves, When we will tempt the frailty of our powers, Presuming on their changeful potency.” Yet Robert G. Ingersoll said that Shakespeare holds crime to be the mistake of ignorance! N. P. Willis, Parrhasius: “How like a mounting devil in the heart Rules unrestrained ambition!”
(b) Even in the nobler forms of unregenerate life, the principle of selfishness is to be regarded as manifesting itself in the preference of lower ends to that of God's proposing. Others are loved with idolatrous affection because these others are regarded as a part of self. That the selfish element is present even here, is evident upon considering that such affection does not seek the highest interest of its object, that it often ceases when unreturned, and that it sacrifices to its own gratification the claims of God and his law.
Even in the mother's idolatry of her child, the explorer's devotion to science, the sailor's risk of his life to save another's, the gratification sought may be that of a lower instinct or desire, and any substitution of a lower for the highest object is non-conformity to law, and therefore sin. H. B. Smith, System Theology, 277—“Some lower affection is supreme.” And the underlying motive which leads to this substitution is self-gratification. There is no such thing as disinterested sin, for “every one that loveth is begotten of God” (1 John 4:7). Thomas Hughes, The Manliness of Christ: Much of the heroism of battle is simply “resolution in the actors to have their way, contempt for ease, animal courage which we share with the bulldog and the weasel, intense assertion of individual will and force, avowal of the rough-handed man that he has that in him which enables him to defy pain and danger and death.”
Mozley on Blanco White, in Essays, 2:143: Truth may be sought in order to absorb truth in self, not for the sake of absorbing self in truth. So Blanco White, in spite of the pain of separating from old views and friends, lived for the selfish pleasure of new discovery, till all his early faith vanished, and even immortality seemed a dream. He falsely thought that the pain he suffered in giving up old beliefs was evidence of self-sacrifice with which God must be pleased, whereas it was the inevitable pain which attends the victory of selfishness. Robert Browning, Paracelsus, 81—“I still must hoard, and heap, and class all truths With one ulterior purpose: I must know! Would God translate me to his throne, believe That I should only listen to his words To further my own ends.” F. W. Robertson on Genesis, 57—“He who sacrifices his sense of right, his conscience, for another, sacrifices the God within him; he is not sacrificing self.... He who prefers his dearest friend or his beloved child to the call of duty, will soon show that he prefers himself to his dearest friend, and would not sacrifice himself for his child.” Ib., 91—“In those who love little, love [for finite beings] is a primary affection,—a secondary, in those who love much.... The only true affection is that which is subordinate to a higher.” True love is love for the soul and its highest, its eternal, interests; love that seeks to make it holy; love for the sake of God and for the accomplishment of God's idea in his creation.
Although we cannot, with Augustine, call the virtues of the heathen “splendid vices”—for they were relatively good and useful,—they still, except in possible instances where God's Spirit wrought upon the heart, were illustrations of a morality divorced from love to God, were lacking in the most essential element demanded by the law, were therefore infected with sin. Since the law judges all action by the heart from which it springs, no action of the unregenerate can be other than sin. The ebony-tree is white in its outer circles of woody fibre; at heart it is black as ink. There is no unselfishness in the unregenerate heart, apart from the divine enlightenment and energizing. Self-sacrifice for the sake of self is selfishness after all. Professional burglars and bank-robbers are often carefully abstemious in their personal habits, and they deny themselves the use of liquor and tobacco while in the active practice of their trade. Herron, The Larger Christ, 47—“It is as truly immoral to seek truth out of mere love of knowing it, as it is to seek money out of love to gain. Truth sought for truth's sake is an intellectual vice; it is spiritual covetousness. It is an idolatry, setting up the worship of abstractions and generalities in place of the living God.”
(c) It must be remembered, however, that side by side with the selfish will, and striving against it, is the power of Christ, the immanent God, [pg 571] imparting aspirations and impulses foreign to unregenerate humanity, and preparing the way for the soul's surrender to truth and righteousness.
Rom. 8:7—“the mind of the flesh is enmity against God”; Acts 17:27, 28—“he is not far from each one of us: for in him we live, and move, and have our being”; Rom. 2:4—“the goodness of God leadeth thee to repentance”; John 1:9—“the light which lighteth every man.” Many generous traits and acts of self-sacrifice in the unregenerate must be ascribed to the prevenient grace of God and to the enlightening influence of the Spirit of Christ. A mother, during the Russian famine, gave to her children all the little supply of food that came to her in the distribution, and died that they might live. In her decision to sacrifice herself for her offspring she may have found her probation and may have surrendered herself to God. The impulse to make the sacrifice may have been due to the Holy Spirit, and her yielding may have been essentially an act of saving faith. In Mark 10:21, 22—“And Jesus looking upon him loved him ... he went away sorrowful”—our Lord apparently loved the young man, not only for his gifts, his efforts, and his possibilities, but also for the manifest working in him of the divine Spirit, even while in his natural character he was without God and without love, self-ignorant, self-righteous, and self-seeking.