The World's Great Sermons, Volume 08: Talmage to Knox Little

by Unknown

The pride of life.—1 John ii., 16.

John is giving his disciples the old warning not to love the world, that world which then and always is pressing on men's eyes and ears and hearts with all its loveliness and claiming to be loved. "Love not the world, neither the things that are in the world…. For all that is in the world, the lust of the flesh, and the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life, is not of the Father, but is of the world."

What is the pride of life? Pride is one of those words which hover in the middle region between virtue and vice. The materials which under one set of circumstances and in one kind of character make up an honorable self-respect, seem so often to be precisely the same as those which under another set of circumstances and in another kind of character make up arrogance and self-conceit. This last is the tone evidently in which John speaks. So it is with most moral minglings. All character is personal, determined by some force that blends the qualities into a special personality. The same apparent qualities unite into the most various results. It is like the delicate manufacture of mosaics. The skilful workers of Rome or Venice put in the same ingredients in nature and amount, and the composition comes out at one time dull and muddy and at another time perfectly clear and lustrous. Some subtle difference in the mixture of the constituents or in the condition of the atmosphere or in the heat of the furnace alters the whole result. So out of life we may say in its various minglings there come various products in character, either humility or thankfulness or contentment or self-respect, from some failure of the qualities to meet in perfect union, from some fault in the shape or misregulation of the temperature of the human furnace in which they are fused, this degenerate and confused result of pride which yet is often so near to, that we can see how it was only some slightest cause, some stray and unguarded draft across the surface that hindered it from being, one of the clear and lustrous combinations of the same material. But that fact makes it no better. The muddy glass is no more useful because it is made of the same components as the clear glass. There is nothing still to be done with it but to throw it away.

What then is the pride of life which is bad, which "is not of the Father, but is of the world"? Life itself we know is of the Father. In whatever sense we take that much-meaning word, life is God's gift. The mere physical being, if that be life, is the creation of His mighty word. The continuance, the prolongation of the vital function, if that be life, that too is the result of His never-sleeping care. The surrounding circumstances, the scenery of our experience, if that be life, is also of His arranging. The spiritual vitality, all the higher powers as we call them, of thought and feeling and conscience, if they be life, no hand but His strung and tuned their manifold and subtle cords. Everywhere there is no life but what He gives. It is not of the world. In no sense does any creative power of being issue either from the material earth, or from the social system, or from the mass of conventional laws and standards, each of which is sometimes, in different uses of the word, characterized as "the world." They may all influence and change and give character to life, but none of them can create it.

And perhaps this brings us to what we want. The world may give a certain character or shape to life, even altho it cannot create it. Now pride is a certain character or shape of life. It is a term of description not of the material of life but of a particular result of that material fused into a particular furnace. In general the shape of life which pride describes may be otherwise characterized as arrogant self-reliance or self-sufficiency. We may reach more minute definitions of it before we are done, but this seems to make the meaning plain when it is said that the pride of life is not of the Father, but of the world. Life comes from God. It is the world's influence that shapes that life, which has no moral character in itself, into arrogance and self-sufficiency, makes it up into pride instead of into humility, and so leaves as the result the pride of life. The pride of life, then, is God's gift which means dependence changed and distorted into independence, revolt and disobedience.

Most necessary is it that in all we say we should keep clear in mind that the first gift is God's. The substance of life is His. All evil is misuse, otherwise repentance must be cursed with misanthropy and hopelessness instead of being as it always ought to be, the very birthplace of hope, the spring of a new life from the worn-out failure of an old, back into the possibility of life that is older still, as old as man's first creation.

Let us see where the pride of life shows itself. First of all doubtless in the mere exuberance of animal strength. To be well and strong, full of spirit and physical vitality, this is beyond all doubt one of the most precious gifts of God. We never can forget the large strong physical strain with which our Bible opens, the torrent of health and full life that seems to pour down to us out of those early days when the world was young, when the giants made the earth shake under their mighty tread and the patriarchs outlived the forests with their green old years. The fulness of physical vitality is of God, to be accepted as His benefaction, to be cultivated and cared for with the reverence that His gifts demand. And round the mere physical life group a whole circle of tastes and enjoyments and exercises which belong with the sensuous more than with the intellectual or moral part of us, and whose full life seems to be dependent upon the fulness of physical being, the mere perception of beauty, the love of comfort, the delight in enterprise and adventure and prowess. The sum of all these is what we call full physical life. It is what gives youth its most generous charm and makes it always poetic with its suggested powers and unaccomplished possibilities.

But yet this mere fulness of life as we all know has its dangers. Mere health is overbearing by its very nature. There is a lack of sympathy in it. Not knowing suffering itself, it is not respectful of suffering in others. It is not careful of inflicting suffering. The full blood sings of nothing but itself. It is careless of others. It is careless of God, not malignantly cruel, nor deliberately atheistic, but selfish with a sort of self-absorption which is often, very gracious in its forms and infidel with a mere forgetfulness of God. Who of us does not know, and who of us, wavering between his standards and his feelings, has not very often found it hard to tell just how he ought to value the enthusiastic and arrogant self-sufficiency of healthy youth?

It is this, I take it, that is described here as "the pride of life." Wherever there is eager and full-blooded youth there it appears. It breaks out in the wild and purposeless mob of lower city life, in the impatience and insubordination of the country boy who longs to be free from his father's farm, in the crude skepticism of college students' first discussions of religion. It is jealous of slight, of insult, of the least suspicion of restraint or leading. It belongs to strong young nations as well as to strong young men. By it they flaunt defiance in the face of the world and are afraid of the imputation of prudence. It is what you can see in the faces of any group of eager young men as you pass them on the street. Sometimes it makes them attractive and sometimes it makes them detestable. It turns the noble youth into a hero and the mean youth into a bully. A fine nature it leads into the most exquisite tastes and encircles it with art and music. A coarse nature it plunges into the vilest debauchery and vice. In good fortune it makes the temper carelessly benignant. In bad fortune it makes the temper recklessly defiant. It works these very different effects but is always the one same spirit still,—the pride of life. The gift of life which came from God, taken possession of by the world and tamed into self-sufficiency, a thing not of the Father, but of the world, who does not know in himself, or see in somebody he watches, something of this pure pride in life? Just to live is so attractive that the higher ends and responsibilities of living drift away out of sight. This instinctive almost physical selfishness is the philosophy of more than we think both of the good and of the bad that is in young people.

I have seen too much of it to undervalue the sweet and sober piety of old age. There is a beauty in it that is all its own. A softness and tenderness and patience and repose in the western sky that the bolder glories of the east where the morning breaks never can attain. Many and many of the best men we have known have been old men, but no one looks at men's progress without feeling that a great deal of what passes for growth in goodness as men grow old is in reality only the deadening of the pride of life from the dying-down of the life itself. Many and many a man who passes for a sober, conscientious, religious sort of man at fifty, if you put back into his cooled blood the hot life he had at twenty-five would be the same reckless, profligate, arrogant sinner that he was then. It is the life, not the pride, that he has lost. Many and many a man thinks that he has saved his house from conflagration because he, sees no flame, when really the flame is hidden only because the house is burnt down and the fire is still lurking among the ashes, hunting out any little prey that is left and hungrily waiting for more fuel to light up the darkness again. One thing at least is true, that the goodness of old age in what we may call its passive forms, humility, submission, patience, faith, is necessarily far more hard to recognize and be sure of than the same goodness in a younger man. What you call piety may be only deadness.