But I suggested at the outset that the word life was used in various meanings, and in connection with one or two of them I should like to develop a little what is meant by this phrase the “pride of life.”  Life sometimes familiarly signifies what we otherwise call circumstances.  A man is said to “get on in life,” not with reference to his growing older or growing healthier, but as he grows more rich, more prosperous.  The pride of life in this sense would be the pride of success, which we see wherever men are struggling in this world of competition.  Look at the young merchant who is making a living.  Things go well with him.  He rises from stratum to stratum of that commercial system whose geology is the ever-eluding study of the toilers of the street.  He grows rich.  His store begins to spread with the pressure of new enterprises.  His house begins to blossom into the rich bloom of luxury.  He is greeted with a new respect.  He is courted with an eagerness he never knew before.  Friends gather about him.  His word has weight.  His name means money.  He is successful.  What is the result?  Those facts in themselves signify nothing, let us remember, but material capable of being made into one thing or another wholly its opposite.  These are the gift of the Father, every one of them, all that profusion of life.  But there is a possible effect of them all in character, a pride, which is not of the Father, but of the world.  With a morbid sympathy the man assimilates all that is poor and mean and worldly out of his prosperity, and rejects, because he has no affinity for it, all that is good and sweet and heavenly.  He is chilled and narrowed and embittered.  All the old sweetness and humility fade out of his nature.  Need I tell you of it?  Our streets are full of the pride of life.  Its types only, its outer types flash in the splendid carriages and blaze in the fronts of gaudy houses and sweep the floors of drawing-rooms and the 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.