This intellectual pride is one of the very greatest sins to which humanity is tempted.  It goes very deep in its destructive force because it is a sin, preeminently, of the spiritual nature, of that in us which is akin to God, His very image.  It is, you will remember, the sin on which our Lord centres His chief denunciation.  And common as it has always been, it has never been so common as it is to-day.  Pilate and the chief priests are duplicated in every community in the thousands who reject Christianity without any adequate examination as incredible in view of what they actually hold, or as inconvenient in view of what they desire to practice.  We have only to read very superficially in the current literature of the day, we have only to examine the teaching in colleges, to be completely convinced of the vast extent of the revolt against the Christian Religion.  This revolt is for the most part a revolt without adequate examination.  It assumes that the Christian Religion is contrary to science, or to something else that is established as true.  It looks at Christianity superficially through the eyes of those who reject it and are ignorant of it.  The fact is that Christianity cannot be understood in any complete sense of the word by those who do not practice it.  Its “evidence” is no doubt of great force; of sufficient force to lead men to experiment; but the actual comprehension of Christ as the Saviour of man is an experience.  The operation of the Holy Spirit in life is necessarily proved, and only completely proved, by the action of the Spirit Himself.

Another demonstration of the same pride is seen in the refusal, without adequate examination, to accept the Catholic Religion, and the picking and choosing among articles of belief and sacraments and practices as to what we will use or observe.  Men do not like this or that, and they therefore decline it.  The whole attitude is one of self-will and pride.  Whatsoever comes to us with a great weight of Christian experience back of it certainly deserves careful consideration; it demands of us that we treat it as other than a matter of taste.  Pride is the commonest of sins and the most dangerous for it attacks the very heart of the spiritual life.  It runs, to be sure, through a broad range of experience and not all manifestations of pride are mortal sin; but all manifestations of it are subtle and insidious and capable of expansion to an indefinite degree.  For there is no difference in nature between the spiritual attitude of the person who says, “I do not see any sense in that and will not do it,” when the matter in question may be the Church’s rule of fasting, and that of the man who before Pilate’s Judgment Seat cried out, “We have no king but Caesar.”