Faith in one’s self lies perilously near to some of the most hindering and ruinous defects of character: to conceit, to presumption, to obstinacy, to neglect of other men’s thoughts and feelings, to loss of sensitiveness and gentleness and delicacy, to a deficient sense of humour: all these are close about it, threatening to assimilate it to themselves, or to mix themselves with it.
Self-confidence is apt to address itself to an imaginary dulness in others; as people who are well-off speak in a cajoling tone to the poor, and those who are in the prime of life raise their voice and talk artificially to seniors, hastily conceiving them to be deaf and rather imbecile. [Note: George Eliot, Daniel Deronda.]
Selfishness has swept the house,
Vanity has garnished it,
With desires furnished it.
Not a crumb to feed a mouse
Have they left of household bread,
Duty, honour, charity.
“Food for common mortals,” said Vanity. [Note: Margaret L. Woods, Poems, 148.]
1. The most obvious peril is selfishness. Standing alone, consciously or unconsciously without any knowledge of God, uninfluenced by any thought of a future life, without any intelligent conception of the responsibility we all have for those among whom we live, a man becomes to himself the centre of thought, almost of worship; his wishes, his wants, his success—these are the sole motive forces within him; and in the full strong belief in his own capacity to push his way—not sensitive enough, or finely strung enough, to contemplate the possibility of mistake or failure in himself—he goes forward, regardless of what may happen to any with whom he comes in contact, utterly indifferent as to who may fall or who may suffer, provided only he may succeed. And so, step by step, the strong pushing man grows into the hard selfish man of the world, who, making great boast of his own capacities and powers, forces his way right on to the prize he means to grasp. Of course, the refinements of cultured life do something to conceal such a character under a decent varnish of consideration for others; good taste and the laws of society require certain courtesies from us in dealing with each other, and he is too shrewd and too alive to his own interests not to comply with these demands.
2. The selfishness of the self-confident is sure to show itself in harsh judgment. Carlyle is a notable example. His biographer does his character less than justice; but in representing him as scornful of weaker intellects and weaker wills than his own, and in his scorn using too freely that biting tongue of his, Froude must, it is feared, be acquitted of unfairness.
Carlyle’s existence hitherto had been a prolonged battle; a man does not carry himself in such conflicts so wisely and warily that he can come out of them unscathed; and Carlyle carried scars from his wounds both on his mind and on his temper. He had stood aloof from parties; he had fought his way alone. He was fierce and uncompromising. To those who saw but the outside of him he appeared scornful, imperious, and arrogant. He was stern in his judgment of others. The sins of passion he could pardon, but the sins of insincerity, or half-sincerity, he could never pardon. He would not condescend to the conventional politenesses which remove the friction between man and man. He called things by their right names, and in a dialect edged with sarcasm. Thus he was often harsh when he ought to have been merciful; he was contemptuous where he had no right to despise; and in his estimate of motives and actions was often unjust and mistaken. He, too, who was so severe with others had weaknesses of his own of which he was unconscious in the excess of his self-confidence. He was proud—one may say savagely proud. It was a noble determination in him that he would depend upon himself alone; but he would not only accept no obligation, but he resented the offer of help to himself or to anyone belonging to him as if it had been an insult. [Note: Thomas Carlyle: First Forty Years, 471.]
3. Another peril is persecution. When those who, in their confidence, pass judgment harshly on others, have the power to persecute, they are only too ready to use that power.
The edict of Nantes was recalled on the 17th November 1685. The elder Le Teller, dying at 83, some days later, sang a Nunc dimittis. Long before, many churches had been destroyed, 141 in 1663 alone, Roman clergy authorised to force their way to the dying, children of seven allowed to change their religion and claim a pension from their parents; singing of psalms was forbidden in the open air or in the churches while a procession went by; funerals were restricted to the twilight; dragoons quartered on the Protestants with orders to push them to the last extremity, to live very licentiously. Louvois has enriched our language with two words, the verb “to dragoon,” the substantive “dragoonade.” By the edict all churches were destroyed; all pastors banished with one fortnight’s grace under pain of the galleys; lay emigration entirely forbidden; all children, from five to sixteen years of age, to be taken from their parents and brought up as Catholics; death to all pastors found in the country; men who helped them to be sentenced to the galleys, women to prison for life; death to all holding assemblies or any exercise of religion; all who in sickness refused the sacraments, on recovery to be sent to the galleys or prison for life, in case of death, their bodies to be cast out unburied; in either case their estates confiscated; books of religion, Bibles, prayerbooks, psalters, to be burnt; all offices and professions, down to that of midwife, closed to professors of the religion pretendue reformee; the marriages of Protestants were declared void, their children illegitimate. I mention only one torture out of many, the invention of Foucault, very effective in procuring conversions: the torturers by relays keeping sleep from the victims’ eyelids. This Foucault was, I grieve to say, a scholar, and, by a strange irony of fate, first discovered Lactantius “On the death of persecutors.” All these and countless other penalties, more grievous than death, were summarily inflicted without due form of trial. In one year, though France was kept like a dungeon girt by troops and ships, 9000 sailors, 12,000 soldiers, 600 officers had emigrated, including the best general of his age, Schomberg. Switzerland, the Low Countries, Germany, England, America, the Cape, all gained by the loss of the flower of the French industry and learning. Berlin, till then not half the size of our present Cambridge, made rapid strides. In London there were thirty-one churches of French Protestants. The present Lord Mayor, the Bishop Designate of Worcester, our Junior Missioner at Walworth, are all of emigrant blood. [Note: J. E. B. Mayor, Sermons, 138.]
4. But the self-confident man runs another risk, more personal, more subtle, and more hurtful. He runs the risk of presumption.
We are careful to distinguish between the serene courage which best deals with danger and the foolhardiness which courts disaster. The collier descending underground with his safety-lamp has our sympathy whilst he walks warily; but when he forces his lamp to light his pipe, we only despise and condemn. The line of demarcation between wise conduct in the presence of danger and recklessness is generally clear. Sensible men cherish the habit of awareness; they watch over their health and safety, make the margin between themselves and loss as wide as possible, keep well within the lines chalked out by experience, and risk nothing without adequate cause. On the contrary, the foolish presume on their cleverness; they confide in luck, graze the rock, swim the river just above the falls, their supreme piquant entertainment being “a narrow shave.” We see examples of both types alike in daily and in moral life.
(1) In ordinary life, when men run serious risks something of consequence stands to be won. Whenever one goes forth with a shroud under his arm to attempt any enterprise, he has, as a rule, an adequate prize in view, or at least thinks that he has. Alfred Nobel, the famous inventor of explosives, lived for years dealing with the most dangerous substances and making experiments fraught with peril. He was ever handling terrible compounds like nitro-glycerine, gunpowder, dynamite, blasting glycerine, guncotton, blasting gelatine, cordite, and any hour might have been blown to atoms. He habitually faced death in its most terrible forms. But this hazardous life was redeemed by a great purpose. The brave experimentalist sought to solve important problems, and to equip the engineer with forces that might the sooner establish the pathway of civilization. He who in a daredevil spirit sports with gunpowder, cordite, or dynamite is a fool.
(2) To dabble with any forbidden thing in the moral life is inexcusable folly; for it does not, and it cannot, bring any advantage whatever. The wounds received in the service of sin carry no honour; the ventures made at the bidding of vicious caprice yield no profit; the forbidden precipices we climb with bleeding feet only render our folly the more conspicuous and our punishment the more complete. “What fruit then had ye at that time in the things whereof ye are now ashamed? for the end of those things is death.” What fools we are! How incurable is our folly! Shall we never learn that there is nothing worth having beyond the hedge? Everything good for the body; everything in nature, art, science, literature, adventure, that gives intellectual entertainment and delight; whatever society bestows of love and joy; the world, genius, life, the affluence of the present, the splendour of hope, alI are ours within the lines of reason and righteousness; yet in very wantonness we break bounds and trespass on ground where we stand to lose everything! To put our great life into pawn at the bidding of arrogant recklessness is the supreme infatuation.
The wife of the celebrated physician, Sir William Priestley, was a strenuous advocate of the theories of Pasteur, and in her book entitled The Story of a Lifetime she describes a dinner given at her house to enable Mr. Chamberlain to meet some of Pasteur’s disciples and to become acquainted with his methods. “On entering the drawing-room after dinner, Mr. Chamberlain had the felicity of finding himself, for the first time in his life, in a veritable museum of living disease. On every side were glass tubes, with nothing between himself and a variety of contagious diseases but cotton-wool stoppers. Standing in the presence of this awe-inspiring world, Chamberlain was not afraid.” No, these gentlemen were not afraid; they gaily talked and laughed, although meeting in a veritable museum of horrors, amid tubes containing flourishing families of disease, plates smeared with gelatine containing microbes of various kinds, and microscopes through which could be seen the bacilli when taken fresh from the blood of disease-stricken men or animals. Only a frail particle of cotton-wool separated them from the ghastliest plagues; yet it was enough. This narrative is a parable of our moral situation and peril. The world in which perforce we dwell and act is a museum of living disease; everything is infested with contagion; we are threatened by- a thousand deaths: yet are we perfectly secure. The ethereal defences by which God renders His sincere children immune are sufficient. We may live in perfect confidence and peace, enjoying without a disturbing thought all the pleasant things life has to give. The God of our salvation can seal “the pit of the abyss” with an electron, render a bubble a fortress, hedge us in with a gossamer; or, to drop the imagery, the altogether invisible and intangible action of divine grace will secure the absolute safety of all who are pure in heart, even though Pandemonium seethe around them. “Surely he shall deliver thee from the snare of the fowler, and from the noisome pestilence. Thou shalt not be afraid for the terror by night; nor for the arrow that flieth by day; nor for the pestilence that walketh in darkness; nor for the destruction that wasteth at noonday. A thousand shall fall at thy side, and ten thousand at thy right hand; but it shall not come nigh thee. There shall no evil befall thee, neither shall any plague come nigh thy dwelling.” [Note: W. L. Watkinson, The Fatal Barter, 142.]
