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.