C.S. Lewis On Pride..And A Little Comment From Me.

For Pride is a spiritual cancer: it eats up the very possibility of love, or contentment, or even common sense.

Pleasure in being praised is not Pride. The child who is patted on the back for doing a lesson well, the woman whose beauty is praised by her lover, the saved soul to whom Christ says, "Well done," are pleased and ought to be. For here the pleasure lies not in what you are but in the fact that you have pleased someone you wanted (and rightly wanted) to please. The trouble begins when you pass from thinking, "I have pleased him; all is well," to thinking, "What a fine person I must be to have done it." The more you delight in yourself and the less you delight in the praise, the worse you are becoming.

~ C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity page 112.


And I remind myself and my readers that it is much easier to see pride in others than in ourselves. We're astonished to find that this cancer dwells in places within us that we have never dreamed it would exist. When we discover it in ourselves or God points it out through someone else, may we call it what it is and ask God to cleanse us. It is a painful process.