Cease
from sensuality, said Cicero, for if once you give your minds up to
sensuality, you will never be able to think of anything else.
Ambition, emulation, and envy are the leading members of a whole prolific
family of satanic passions in the human heart. Indeed, these passions,
taken along with their kindred passions of hatred and ill-will, are, in
our Lord's words, the very lusts of the devil himself. The Jews hated
our Lord the more for what He said about these detestable passions, but
His own disciples love Him only the more that He so well knows the evil
affections of their hearts, and so well describes and denounces them.
Anybody can denounce sensual sin, and everybody will understand and
approve. But spiritual sin,--ambition and emulation and envy and ill-
will--these things are more easy to denounce than they are to detect and
describe, and more easy to detect and describe than they are to cast out.
These sins seem rather to multiply and to strike a deeper root when you
begin to cast them out. What an utterly and abominably evil passion is
envy which is awakened not by bad things but by the best things! That
another man's talents, attainments, praises, rewards should kindle it,
and that the blame, the depreciation, the hurt that another man suffers
should satisfy it,--what a piece of very hell must that be in the human
heart! What more do we need than just a little envy in our hearts to
make us prostrate penitents before God and man all our days? What more
doctrine, argument, proof, authority, persuasion should a sane man need
beyond a little envy in his heart at his best friend to make him an
evangelical believer and an evangelical preacher? How, in the name of
wonder, is it that men can be so ignorant of the plague of their own
hearts as to remain indifferent, and, much more, hostile, to the gospel
of love and holiness? Pride, also,--what a hateful and intolerable
passion is that! How stone-blind to his own state must that sinner be
whose heart is filled with pride, and how impossible it is for that man
to make any real progress in any kind of truth or goodness! And
resentment,--what a deep-seated, long-lived, and suicidal passion is
that! How it hunts down him it hates, and how surely it shuts the door
of salvation against him who harbours it! Forgive us our debts, the
resentful man says in his prayer, as we forgive our debtors.
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