PRIDE OF LIFE[1]

[Footnote 1: Published for the first time by the kind permission of
William G. Brooks.]

_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