Pride is often called an honorable vice, because its aspirations are lofty, because it supposes strength, and tends directly to elevate man, rather than to debase and degrade him, like the other vices.  Yet pride is compatible with every meanness.  It lodges in the heart of the pauper as well as in that of the prince.  There is nothing contemptible that it will not do to satisfy itself; and although its prime malice is to oppose God it has every quality to make it as hideous as Satan himself.  It goeth before a fall, but it does not cease to exist after the fall; and no matter how deep down in the mire of iniquity you search, you will find pride nethermost.  Other vices excite one’s pity; pride makes us shudder.

CHAPTER X. COVETOUSNESS.

“What is a miser?” asked the teacher of her pupils, and the bright boy spoke up and answered:  one who has a greed for gold.  But he and all the class were embarrassed as to how this greed for gold should be qualified.  The boy at the foot of the class came to the rescue, and shouted out:  misery.

Less wise answers are made every day in our schools.  Misery is indeed the lot, if not the vice, of the miser.  ’Tis true that this is one of the few vices that arrive at permanent advantages, the others offering satisfaction that lasts but for a moment, and leaves nothing but bitterness behind.  Yet, the more the miser possesses the more insatiable his greed becomes, and the less his enjoyment, by reason of the redoubled efforts he makes to have and to hold.

But the miser is not the only one infected with the sin of avarice.  His is not an ordinary, but an extreme case.  He is the incarnation of the evil.  He believes in, hopes in, and loves gold above all things; he prays and sacrifices to it.  Gold is his god, and gold will be his reward, a miserable one.

This degree of the vice is rare; or, at least, is rarely suffered to manifest itself to this extent; and although scarcely a man can be found to confess to this failing, because it is universally regarded as most loathsome and repulsive, still few there are who are not more or less slaves to cupidity.  Pride is the sin of the angels; lust is the sin of the brute, and avarice is the sin of man.  Scripture calls it the universal evil.  We are more prone to inveigh against it, and accuse others of the vice than to admit it in ourselves.

Sometimes, it is “the pot calling the kettle black;” more often it is a clear case of “sour grapes.”  Disdain for the dollars “that speak,” “the mighty dollars,” in abundance and in superabundance, is rarely genuine.