Pride is the inordinate love and exaltation of self—the disposition by which a man esteems himself above his due, sets his own will, glory, and judgment against God’s, and refuses the creature’s proper place of dependence and submission. It is widely reckoned by the divines the root and chief of sins, the parent vice from which the others spring. It was, by long tradition, the sin by which Lucifer fell, lifting up his heart against his Maker; it was the bait of the first temptation, “ye shall be as gods”; and it is the essence of all sin considered as rebellion, for every sin is at bottom the assertion of self against God. Scripture sets pride in the sharpest opposition to the divine favor: God resisteth the proud, but giveth grace unto the humble; pride goeth before destruction, and a haughty spirit before a fall; everyone that is proud in heart is an abomination to the LORD. Pride is peculiarly hateful and peculiarly dangerous because it is the sin most blind to itself, cloaking itself in respectability and even in religion—the Pharisee thanking God he is not as other men. It resists the gospel at the very threshold, for grace can be received only by the empty hand of the humble, and the proud will not stoop to be saved by another’s righteousness. The remedy is not the false humility that merely affects a low opinion of self, but the true humility wrought by a sight of God’s majesty and one’s own sin, which lays the soul in the dust and exalts Christ alone. Hence the whole Christian life is, in one aspect, a long war against the pride that the Fall enthroned and that grace must dethrone.