aisles of churches. Those types, the mere
outward trappings of success, are not wherein the badness lies. The
reality is in the hard hearts and selfish tempers and undocile minds
which, in the splendor or the squalidness of wealth, show the sad ruin
of self-sufficient success, the pride of life.

The pride of life kills out the life itself. Is there a sadder picture
than you have in the life of a man, old or young, to whom God has
sent prosperity, who by his own act then turns that prosperity into a
failure by being proud of it? Christ Himself has told us how it is.
The life is more than meat. He has no tolerance for this little
meaning of a word that He made so large. The life is more than meat.
Yes, life is meat and man, and to lose the best manhood to get the
meat, to lose the soul to save the body, to fail of heaven above you
and before you that you may own the ground under your feet, that is
not success but failure. "In all time of our prosperity, Good Lord
deliver us!" May God help you who are prosperous.

I would speak again of what is called intellectual life, the life of
thought. It is "of the Father," indeed. We picture to ourselves
the pure joy of God in thought. Free from so many of our cumbrous
processes, free from the limitations of slow-moving time, free from
all imperfection, with an instantaneous thought as is His being, the
intellect that is the center of all reason revolves in its unfathomed
majesty. And man thinks too. God makes him think. God gives him powers
to think with, and then, as when you pour for your child a stream of
water out of your cisterns upon the wheels of the machinery that you
have first built for him, God gives man thoughts to exercise his power
of thinking upon. Can anything be more humble? The power was from God,
the thoughts by which the power moves were God's thoughts first. "Oh,
God, I think Thy thoughts after Thee," cried John Kepler, when he
caught sight of the great law of planetary motion. But mere thought,
self-satisfied, seeking no unity in God, owning no dependence,
boasting of itself, counting it hardship that it cannot know all where
it knows so much, this is the pride of thought, and this is not of the
Father, but is of the world. How arrogant it is! How it is jealous of
dictation, how it chafes under a hand that presses it down and a voice
that says to it, "Wait! what thou knowest not now thou shall; know
hereafter." How carefully it limits its kind of evidence, s