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Fourteenth Wednesday after Pentecost
- caelidomum
- Sep 16
- 3 min read
Fourteenth Wednesday after Pentecost. Pride.
Summary of the Morrow’s Meditation.
We will meditate to-morrow upon the state which is the most opposed to humility, which is pride, and we shall see; 1st, what pride is; 2d, how we render ourselves guilty of it. We will thence deduce the resolution: 1st, carefully to watch over our interior in order to keep ourselves on our guard against the inspirations of pride, of self-esteem, and of the desire to be esteemed; 2d, to hold pride in horror, and every day to endeavor to correct ourselves of it. Our spiritual nosegay shall be the advice of Tobias to his son: “Never suffer pride to reign in thy mind or in thy words; for from it all perdition took its beginning” (Tob. iv. 14).
Meditation for the Morning.
Let us adore God severely chastising pride in the person of Lucifer and of the bad angels. Hardly had these rebels conceived the first thought of raising themselves above what God had made them, than God casts them down from highest heaven into the lowest depths of hell, and makes them pass in one moment from extremest happiness to extremest misery. Thus is punished one single proud thought. O God, who would not tremble in presence of so terrible a chastisement? (St. Bernard, Serm. liv. in Cant.)
What Pride is.
Pride is an inordinate esteem of our own excellence which is always aspiring to raise itself higher and higher. It is a subtle poison which insinuates itself insensibly into the soul, and corrupts, if it does not destroy, the most sublime virtues. It is a mental malady which makes us lose our mental balance, and leads to insanity, there being no greater madmen than the proud, who feed upon wind and smoke, and lose eternal glory for the glory of a moment. It is a poisoned fountain whence flow forth all kinds of sin (Ecclus. xi. 15), and this evil is more common than we think; for it is pride which, after having been the ruin of the bad angels, is still the cause of everyday casting so great a number of men into perdition. It is an execrable evil which tends to nothing less than to dethrone God in the soul by stealing His glory from Him, an evil which the Holy Spirit for this reason strikes with the anathemas of heaven and earth (Ibid. x. 7). Therefore God takes pleasure in confounding the proud, first in this world, by permitting them to fall into shameful sins; then in the next world, by casting them into the lowest depths of hell, there to be eternally insulted by the devils. Are these the sentiments we entertain in regard to pride ? and do we thoroughly understand the horror with which it ought to inspire us?
In what Manner we Render ourselves Guilty of Pride.
We render ourselves guilty of pride in many ways: 1st, by attaching ourselves to our own ideas and our own will; we prefer our own way of looking at things to that which is held by others, and we are determined to cling to it. We are independent, we will follow only our own will, and if we are obliged to obey, we are annoyed at having to do so, we murmur, and we do it badly; 2d, through presumption; we think ourselves to be capable of everything, we have no doubts about it; we cast ourselves rashly in to the most difficult enterprises, and yet at the same time we are pusillanimous and are stopped by the slightest obstacles; 3d, by complaisance in ourselves; we are proud of the smallest ad vantages which we imagine ourselves to possess; we prefer ourselves to others, and, in order to give a reason for this preference, we keep our attention fixed solely on their defects, we make but little account of them, we criticise and ridicule them, we find something to blame in all that they do, we approve only what we do ourselves, and we expect that no one should blame us for any of these things; 4th, by boasting; we speak of ourselves at every opportunity, we praise ourselves on every occasion, we endeavor to make ourselves looked upon as something; we aspire to honors, to dignities, to exalted positions; we believe that we deserve them and do all we can to obtain them; 5th, by self-sufficiency; we will not take advice from any one; we imagine that we are sufficient to ourselves; 6th, by hypocrisy; we make an outward show of possessing more piety and virtue, more talent and capacity, than we really possess. Let us examine our conscience; are there not in us some of these characteristics of pride?
Resolutions and spiritual nosegay as above.
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