Excellence is a quality that raises a man above the common level and distinguishes him among his fellow-beings.  The term is relative.  The quality may exist in any degree or measure.  ’Tis only the few that excel eminently; but anyone may be said to excel who is, ever so little, superior to others, be they few or many.  Three kinds of advantages go to make up one’s excellence.  Nature’s gifts are talent, knowledge, health, strength, and beauty; fortune endows us with honor, wealth, authority; and virtue, piety, honesty are the blessings of grace.  To the possession of one or several of these advantages excellence is attached.

All good is made to be loved.  All gifts directly or indirectly from God are good, and if excellence is the fruit of these gifts, it is lawful, reasonable, human to love it and them.  But measure is to be observed in all things.  Virtue is righteously equidistant, while vice goes to extremes.  It is not, therefore, attachment and affection for this excellence, but inordinate, unreasonable love that is damnable, and constitutes the vice of pride.

God alone is excellent and all greatness is from Him alone.  And those who are born great, who acquire greatness, or who have greatness thrust upon them, alike owe their superiority to Him.  Nor are these advantages and this preeminence due to our merits and deserts.  Everything that comes to us from God is purely gratuitous on His part, and undeserved on ours.  Since our very existence is the effect of a free act of His will, why should not, for a greater reason, all that is accidental to that existence be dependent on His free choice?  Finally, nothing of all this is ours or ever can become ours.  Our qualities are a pure loan confided to our care for a good and useful purpose, and will be reclaimed with interest.

Since the malice of our pride consists in the measure of affection we bestow upon our excellence, if we love it to the extent of adjudging it not a gift of God, but the fruit of our own better selves; or if we look upon it as the result of our worth, that is, due to our merits, we are guilty of nothing short of downright heresy, because we hold two doctrines contrary to faith.  “What hast thou, that thou hast not received?” If a gift is due to us, it is no longer a gift.  This extreme of pride is happily rare.  It is directly opposed to God.  It is the sin of Lucifer.

A lesser degree of pride is, while admitting ourselves beholden to God for whatever we possess and confessing His bounties to be undeserved, to consider the latter as becoming ours by right of possession, with liberty to make the most of them for our own personal ends.  This is a false and sinful appreciation of God’s gifts, but it respects His and all subordinate authority.  If it never, in practice, fails in this submission, there is sin, because the plan of God, by which all things must be referred to Him, is thwarted; but its malice is not considered grievous.  Pride, however,