SERMON VII.

PRIDE A STUMBLING BLOCK.

PROVERBS, CHAP. XVI. VER. 18.

"Pride goeth before destruction."

PRIDE was the passion that influenced the temptation, and rendered it successful. This betrayed man through his pride, which existed in the human heart from the beginning; but, ere sin had perverted it, was a regulating attribute of his moral organization, conducing only to good. Once corrupted by sin, it became one of the fiercest and most dangerous passions of our degenerate humanity. It was first assoiled in the mansions of eternal bliss, by the ambition of those whose exclusion was the consequence, for "them hath God reserved in everlasting chains under

darkness, unto the judgment of the Great Day." It was in the garden which God's own hand had planted, that pride first threw off that robe of whiteness, cast over it at the primitive creation, and developed a monster which has since inflicted perpetual injury upon the human race. From heaven this monster was banished, with the celestial rebels. The desire of Satan and his angels to "be as gods" lost them that glory only known above the stars. They fell under the suggestions of ambition. This provoked their everlasting doom; a doom which may involve that of millions, who will incur it through a similar agency. It must, therefore, be a heinous sin, as no trifling offence could be visited with so tremendous a punishment. Trifles provoke not the arm of divine wrath. God is too merciful, too just, too full of love, being the plenitude and perfection of love, to inflict penalties so grievous, when they are not justly merited. Pride lost the rebel angels heaven, the rebel man paradise. It is perpetually working the downfall of the latter. It is a fearful instrument of ruin, for " pride goeth before destruction."

This was fatally verified in Eden, or, at least, on the confines of Eden, when the erring pair were banished from its sacred borders. It went before the Fall, and that Fall has been, and will be, the destruction of multitudes. The first temptation was addressed, but too successfully, to man's pride. It kindled that latent energy which has since blazed forth into an almost

universal conflagration. What did the Tempter promise? Something so specious that innocence was betrayed, and the fiery passions thenceforward unchained, to riot in the mischiefs rising out of that fatal conquest. He promised that, upon eating the forbidden fruit, the first pair and all their posterity, should "be as gods, knowing good and evil." This promise was lamentably fulfilled, and, in its fulfilment, lay the success of the temptation. They acquired by it a knowledge, which unclosed their eyes to a scene of future misery. They knew, thenceforth, that they were naked-spiritually as well as bodily naked. They knew this experimentally, and future experience was to them, a protracted consciousness of forfeited innocence, of forfeited happiness, of alienation from God; still, of recovery, through the mercy of that God, who promised them redemption, by "the seed of the woman," that should "bruise the serpent's head," and restore to them in heaven, the paradise which they had lost upon earth. The prospect before them was changed from certainty to vicissitude; from glory to disaster. They were driven forth from the region of their bliss, to suffering and to shame.

Satan applied to the ambition of his first victims, and ambition is one of the modifications of pride, nay, one of its most fatal. This was at once roused. They should be superior to what they were. They should possess knowledge more excellent than that with which the Creator

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had supplied them. They should be exalted above the holy angels. They should be as gods." Fatal mistake! Such were the specious promptings of the Tempter, and they were but too successful. The woman listened to the plausible advocate of sin, who had approached her under the form of a serpent; which, ere the curse had doomed it to deformity, was more beautiful, as well as more subtle, than any beast of the field," and seeing that the interdicted object was, "a tree to be desired to make one wise," she eat and fell. "She gave also unto her husband with her, and he did eat; and the eyes of both of them were opened, and they knew that they were naked."

Here then you behold the first results of pride, and truly calamitous were they. Sin and death were among them, and to what a frightful extent have they exercised their power, since power was first placed at their disposal, by the parent of the human race! Would Would you desire to have the declaration of the wise son of David more fearfully verified, than it was by the fatal triumph of Eden? It went " before destruction in the world of innocence," and has ever continued to do so in the world of guilt. It is not a weapon of our warfare," in our struggle against "principalities and powers," but one from the offensive armoury of him, whose " fiery darts" are launched in secret against every descendant of Adam. Man, placed in a state of moral and physical perfection, innocent and

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above the influence of sin, if he had chosen to exercise those means of resistance with which the Creator had endowed him, listened to the suggestions of pride, and not only lost paradise, but subjected himself to the doom of eternal death, first incurred by Satan and his rebel hosts.

Such were the terrible consequences of this pernicious passion, and similar to these are its consequences in the world now. It is " a twoedged sword, slaying the souls of men." The sternest miseries are induced by it. It is a perpetual tyranny, too frequently involving spiritual ruin. It circulates with the purest blood, and there is not a human creature so humble, but his spring of life is, more or less, embittered by its poisons. Ambition, the firstborn of Pride, and it has frequently deluged the world with gore, strides like a colossus over the face of the globe, bearing death and desolation in her track. Her voice is even now heard in the distance,* threatening to light again the blazing torch of war, which has been all but completely extinguished above a quarter of a century: an almost unprecedented term of general national repose. To ambition, we are to ascribe the overthrow of empires; the ruin of states; the despotism, the oppression, the tyranny of bad men, and those perpetual hostilities among communities, whether barbarous or civilized, which so com

*In 1841 France appeared to be assuming a hostile.

attitude.