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, shutting out everything that sounds like personal communication, revelation, in its impatient independence; how studiously it orphans itself.  And then how, in some moods, orphaned by its arrogance, it suddenly becomes intensely cognizant of its orphanage, and the child’s hunger for a Father takes possession of its heart and it is dreary and miserable!

I always know, when I speak thus of types of men, that you will think that I am talking of those types in their extreme specimens.  I am not speaking to-day of the miracles of physical vitality, nor of the over-successful men with their colossal fortunes, nor of the mighty thinkers only.  We all have our certain share in these various kinds of life, and each of us may make his little share a seed of pride.  We are strangely ingenious here.  We have an easy faculty of persuading ourselves that ours is best of everything and growing arrogant, unfilial and worldly over it.  I speak to the men confident in their youth and health, to the merchants strong in their business credit, to the thoughtful brains at work over their problems of settling the universe for themselves.  I warn them all against the pride of life.  I would try to show them all that the same material which is capable of being made into pride is capable also of being made into humility.  I would tell them therefore that they have not to be made old or sick or poor or stupid before they can be made humble, that the best humility, as well as the hardest, is that which can come to them here, right in the midst of their strength and wealth and study!