XIII.

THE PRIDE OF INTELLECT.1

"Who is sufficient for these things."-2 COR. ii. 16.

ST. PAUL is thinking of the Christian minister, and of the greatness of the charge entrusted to him. He is a steward, a messenger commissioned by God to declare the Gospel of Jesus Christ. Whether men will hear or whether they will forbear, his duty is the same. Whether men are pleased or offended at his words, he cannot but speak. And he may not shrink from declaring the whole counsel of God, though the inevitable result must be that to some it is the savour of death unto death, and to others the savour of life unto life. Is not such a trust too high for man? Will it not inevitably tend to one of two results? Either men conscious

of their own unfitness will shrink from the work, like Moses when he asked, "Who am I that I should go before Pharaoh?" or else it will carry with it a fatal sense of self-importance which will be the ruin of the work.

The "Pride" Sermon; preached before the University of Oxford, on Sunday, November 24, 1889.

Of these the latter, if not the commonest, is the most obvious danger. The "pride of the priesthood" is no mere scandal invented by those who are enemies of the faith; and we feel that the common protest against what men call sacerdotalism is a true and at heart a Christian protest, though it is little careful to distinguish between the true and the false. Yet true sacerdotalism is not a theory but a fact, the fact that God appoints to all their work, and in religious truth as everywhere else uses the ministry of some for the good of all. The Jews he chose to be the priests of the pre-Christian world, the Church to be the priests of the whole family of man, the ministry to be the priests of the Church; while Christ is Himself the Eternal Priest, the one and only source of Priesthood from whom through all and to all the love of God is revealed.

But it is so hard for man not to assume that a special function or work for God carries with it a magnifying of the individual or official self. We think to magnify our office, and almost without knowing it we come to magnify ourselves. It is against this danger, the pride of the ministry, that St. Paul warns us, when he asks, “Who is sufficient for these things?" and answers the question with the words, "Not that we are sufficient of ourselves to think anything as of ourselves; but our sufficiency is of God; who hath also made us able

ministers of the New Testament."

"For we

preach not ourselves, but Christ Jesus the Lord; and ourselves your servants for Jesus' sake."

The twelve passages of Holy Scripture from which the text for this morning has to be chosen, seem to indicate clearly that the primary object of the "Pride" sermon was to warn the clergy against personal or official pride. But there are two reasons which seem to justify us in taking a more general view of the matter. First, the proportion of clergy to laity in the University, and of their representatives in the University Church, is very different from what it once was; and secondly, we are learning to realize more fully the truth that the Ministry is itself the type of a wider and more generally distributed stewardship, the stewardship of the Christian layman, and in their degree of all those who have a truth to deliver to the world. For everywhere God uses the few for the good of the many, and truth always and everywhere is a sacred trust from God for the service of man. It follows, then, that the very same danger which lies so near the life of the Christian Priest is no less near to the life of every one who dares to handle truth, and that which vitiates and destroys. the work of the Christian Priest is that which is no less fatal to the philosopher, the man of science, the critic, the artist, the musician. That danger is the thought of self-sufficiency-in one word, of

pride the readiness to forget or overlook the truth that there is nothing which we did not receive, and that we may not glory as if we had not received it. Whether we are priests or laymen it is true that "our sufficiency is of God."

But if it is hard for a Christian Priest to distinguish between the uncompromising fidelity to the message he is charged to teach, and a mere defiant self-assertion, it is certainly not less hard for those, who are entrusted with other forms of ministry by God, to distinguish between a loyal devotion to the cause of truth and the self-sufficiency of the individual discoverer or teacher. And the difficulty reaches a climax when religion claims the submission of the reason, or censures the pride of intellect, or speaks of "rationalism" as the foe of faith. For at once we are put upon the defensive. We feel that Reason is not something unholy and impure that it must be banished from the courts of the temple of our God; nor is it some outside power which may indeed become the ally, but more naturally is the foe of the deepest convictions of our religious life. It is the power which God has given us to enable us to know Him; and we slight and despise our birthright if we do not try "to know the things which are freely given us of God." It is not pride in reason to try and know, nor can reason without being false to itself, submit to that which is not true, nor is there any,

even the most sacred region, where it is inconsistent with reverence to ask the question Why? though we may have to answer our own question with the words-" Behold, we know not anything." The truth is that we are wrong to speak of pride or humility as if they could be properly predicated of the reason. Pride is always in the Will.1 And that which is rightly called Pride is an attitude of the reasoner towards truth, not the process by which he seeks it. It is in this sense that Pride is said to lie at the root of all sin, because it is the unwillingness to recognize our true relation towards God and our fellow man,

"Whence flowed rebellion 'gainst the Omnipotent,

Whence hate of man to man, and all else ill?"

In the case of our fellow men this is obvious, though we rather call it selfishness than pride. For at the root of selfishness lies the belief, a belief indeed which is seldom consciously expressed, that the individual is complete in himself. It follows as a natural consequence that while he is an end, others are but means, and that he may make use of them, so far as he is able to do so, for his own enjoyment. Such pure unvarnished selfishness is, indeed, rarely stated. But it is none the less the unavowed, if not quite unconscious, principle of every self-indulgent life, though, like the theoretical basis on which it logically rests, it needs only

1 St. Thom. Aq., Summa Theol., 2. 2, Qu. clxii. Art. iii.