"no man is free of the vice of pride...
and all loathe it, showing no mercy, when seen in others...
but hardly any, except Christians...
know themselves guilty of it..."
"no fault makes us more unpopular...
no other fault are we so unconscious of in ourselves..."
"the more we have it...
the more we dislike it in others..."
"pride, aka self-conceit, is the opposite of humility...
and thus, is at the center of all Christian morals...
the essential vice, the utmost evil...
all other sins are minor, compared to pride..."
"Lucifer became the devil through pride...
pride & jealousy of God's love of mankind...
which lead to his "fall from grace"...
because pride leads to all other vices...
it is a complete, 'anti-God', state of mind...
a competition for power and status..."
"an easy,'how much pride do I have' test...
would be to ask yourself...
'how much do I dislike being snubbed, unnoticed...
patronized, unappreciated, ignored, pushed aside or losing ?'"
"pride competes with pride...
it is essentially competitive by nature...
[the only sin that is...]
pride takes pleasure only in winning...
the comparison of being,'above the rest'...
when the competition is gone, so is pride..."
"greed may drive one to compete...
but pride will continue to push for more...
even when one has more than enough...
just to assert power..."
"most greed & selfishness is really attributable to pride at it's source..."
"pride always means an enmity...
not only between people...
but between people and God..."
"God is in every aspect immeasurably superior to humans...
unless you know God as that...
[that you are nothing in comparison...]
you do NOT know God at all..."
"as long as you are proud...
you cannot know God...
because a proud man always looks down, not up..."
so the question arises...
"how can people who are quite obviously consumed by pride...
say that they believe in God and are Christians?"
"they are deluded...
they imagine how God approves of them...
and they think that they are far better[competition...]
than those 'ordinary people'..."
"they do lip service humility towards God...
and reap a great deal of pride towards their fellow men...
they are probably the ones Christ meant...
when He spoke of those, 'who do things in my name'...
but would be 'unknown to Him' at the judgement..."
"this is a death-trap...
we can all fall into at any time..."
a test of this death-trap...
"whenever we find that our religious life is making us feel,'good'...
above all, 'better', than someone else...
we may be sure that it is the devil, NOT GOD, that is leading us..."
"the true test of being in the presence of God...
is that you either forget about yourself altogether...
[which is the best outcome...]
or you see yourself as a small, dirty object..."
"how terrible that the worst of all vices...
can so successfully smuggle itself into our religious life..."
"the other vices work on [& off of] our animal natures...
pride involves our mind and thus, our souls...
it is the original- and purely spiritual, sin...
by far the most subtle and deadly..."
"part of the subtlety arises when it is used to control behavior...
the devil is perfectly content to see one become brave, chaste & self-controlled...
provided that it sets a person up for the 'dictatorship of pride'...
which is the self, in control, and proud of it..."
"the devil doesn't mind curing you of the flu...
[fear, lust, being uncontrolled...]
if he can give you cancer..."
"pride is spiritual cancer...
it eats up every possibility of love, contentment or even common sense..."
in part 2,"the 4 misunderstandings"[what is NOT pride]...
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