world. In no sense does any creative power of being issue either from
the material earth, or from the social system, or from the mass of
conventional laws and standards, each of which is sometimes, in
different uses of the word, characterized as "the world." They may all
influence and change and give character to life, but none of them can
create it.

And perhaps this brings us to what we want. The world may give a
certain character or shape to life, even altho it cannot create it.
Now pride is a certain character or shape of life. It is a term of
description not of the material of life but of a particular result of
that material fused into a particular furnace. In general the shape of
life which pride describes may be otherwise characterized as
arrogant self-reliance or self-sufficiency. We may reach more minute
definitions of it before we are done, but this seems to make the
meaning plain when it is said that the pride of life is not of the
Father, but of the world. Life comes from God. It is the world's
influence that shapes that life, which has no moral character in
itself, into arrogance and self-sufficiency, makes it up into pride
instead of into humility, and so leaves as the result the pride of
life. The pride of life, then, is God's gift which means dependence
changed and distorted into independence, revolt and disobedience.

Most necessary is it that in all we say we should keep clear in mind
that the first gift is God's. The substance of life is His. All evil
is misuse, otherwise repentance must be cursed with misanthropy and
hopelessness instead of being as it always ought to be, the very
birthplace of hope, the spring of a new life from the worn-out failure
of an old, back into the possibility of life that is older still, as
old as man's first creation.