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.