8. One man cannot exalt himself above others. He cannot do so because the most valuable thing in man is his soul, and no one knows the value of the soul but God.
9. Pride is something entirely different from a consciousness of human dignity. Pride increases with false honors and false popular adulations, but the consciousness of human dignity increases on the contrary with undeserved humiliation and condemnation.
IV.
Effects of the Error of Pride
1. Pride defends not only itself but all the other sins of man. In exalting himself man loses sight of his sin, and his sins become a part of him.
2. As the tall weeds that grow in the wheat field draw all the moisture and all the juices from the soil and shut off the grain from the sun, even so pride monopolizes all the strength of man and shuts him off from the light of truth.
3. The consciousness of sin is often more useful to man than good deeds; the consciousness of sin makes man hiunble, while a good deed frequently puffs up his pride.
Baxter,
4. Many are the penalties of pride, but the principal and the hardest is the fact that in spite of all their merits and in spite of all their endeavors, people do not love those that are proud.
5. No sooner have I exulted over myself, saying how good am I, lo! I am in the ditch.
6. If a man is proud he holds himself aloof from others and thus deprives himself of the greatest pleasure in life, a free and joyful association with all people.
7. A proud man fears all criticism. And his fear is due to the fact that his grandeur is unstable, because it holds only until a tiny hole is pricked in his bubble.
8. Pride would be intelligible if it pleased people and attracted them. But there is no more repulsive characteristic than pride. And yet people continue to cultivate pride.
9. Self-assurance at first puzzles people. And for a time they ascribe to a self-assured man the importance which he attributes to himself. But they do not stay puzzled for any length of time. They are soon disenchanted, and repay with scorn for their disappointing experience.
10. Man knows that he lives an evil life, but instead of changing it for the better, he endeavors to convince himself that he is not the same kind of a man as other people, but is something superior to all others, and for this reason he must live exactly as he is living. Thus it comes that if men live an evil life they are apt to be proud as well.
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V.
Combating the Error of Pride
1. There would be much less evil in the world but for pride. How can we deliver ourselves from this cause of evil ? To deliver ourselves from this evil we have but one method—for each to labor with his own self. The errors of pride will be destroyed only when we destroy within ourselves this deep root of evil. While it lives in our heart, how can we hope that it will die in the hearts of others? Therefore one thing which we can do for our own happiness and that of others is to destroy in our hearts this source of evil from which the world suffers. No improvement is possible until each one of us commences to improve himself.
Lamenais.
2. It is very difficult to destroy human pride; you have hardly patched up one hole when you find it peering out of another, and when you close that, it comes out of a fresh one, and so on. Lichtenbcrg.
3. The sin of pride may be destroyed only by the recognition of the oneness of the spirit that dwells in all men. Having realized this, a man can no longer count either himself or his family or even his nation as better and higher than all others.
4. It is only then easy to live with a man when you neither regard him as better or higher than yourself nor yourself as better or higher than he.
5. The main purpose of life is to improve your soul. But the proud man always considers himself perfectly good. This is what makes pride so harmful. It hinders man from attending to the principal purpose of life, namely making ourself better.
6. Living for the soul is different from the worldly life in that he who lives for the soul cannot be satisfied with himself no matter how much good he accomplishes; he believes that he has only done his duty, and that far from completely, and therefore can only criticise himself, but by no means be proud or be self-satisfied.
7. "But he that is greatest among you shall be your servant; for whosoever shall exalt himself, shall be abashed and he that shall humble himself shall be exalted."
Matthew, xxiii, 11-12.
He who exalts himself in the opinion of men will be abased, because he that is accounted good, wise and kind, will not strive to be better, wiser and kindlier.
But he who humbles himself shall be exalted, because he who accounts himself bad, will strive to be better, kindlier, more reasonable.
Proud people are as pedestrians walking on stilts instead of walking on foot. They are higher and the mud does not reach up to them and they take larger steps, but the trouble is that you cannot go very far on stilts and the chances are you will fall into mud and people will laugh at you.
Even so it is with proud people. They are left behind by people who use no stilts to make themselves artificially taller, and they frequently fall into the mire and become an object of pppular ridicule.
INEQUALITY
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INEQUALITY
The basis of human life is the spirit of God that dwells in man, which is one and the same in all people. Therefore men can not be otherwise than all equal among themselves.
I.
The Substance of the Error of Inequality
1. In olden times people believed that men were bora of various races, black and white, having descended from Ham and Japhet, and that some were meant to be masters and others to be slaves. People acknowledge this division of the human race into masters and slaves because they believed that this division was instituted by God. This crude and ruinous superstition still persists though in another form.
2. We need only glance at the life of Christian nations divided into people who pass their lives in stupefying, murderous, unnecessary toil, and others who are steeped in idleness and all sorts of pleasures, to be amazed at the degree of inequality attained by the people professing the Christian faith, and particularly at the deceitful preaching of equality, while we maintain an order of life which is striking in its cruel and manifest inequality.
3. One of the oldest and most profound of all faiths is the faith of the Hindus. The reason that it has never become universal faith and has failed to yield such fruit in the life of men as it should have yielded, is due to the fact that its teachers acknowledged men to be unequal and divided them into castes. People acknowledging themselves unequal cannot have a true religion..
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4. One can understand people considering themselves unequal because one has a stronger body than another or is more alert, or knows more, or is kindlier than another. But these are not the usual reasons why some men are accounted higher than others. They are accounted unequal because one is named a count and another a peasant, because one wears expensive clothes and the other sandals.
5. Men of our time realize already that the inequality of people is a superstition and in their hearts they condemn it. But those who profit by this inequality cannot make up their minds to give it up, while those who suffer by it do not know how to destroy it.
6. Men have fallen into the habit of dividing people in their minds into distinguished and obscure, noble and common, educated and uneducated, and they have pown so accustomed to this division that they really believe that some people are superior to others, that some people are to be more esteemed than others because they are classed by people in one group, while other people are classed in another group.