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. And detraction,--how some men's ink-horns are filled with detraction for ink, and how it drops from their tongue like poison! At their every word a reputation dies. Life and all its opportunities of doing good and having good done to us is laid like a bag of treasure at our feet, but, like the prodigal son in the Interpreter's House, with all those passions raging in our own hearts at other men, and in other men's hearts at us, we have soon nothing left us but rags. God be thanked for every man here who sees and feels that he has nothing left him but rags; and, still more, thanks for all those who see and feel how, by their bad passions, sensual and spiritual, they have left on other people nothing but rags.
