SELFISHNESS THE ANTAGONIST OF THE PEOPLE.
By Mammon
Sin, as Selfishness, Is Frustration of the Divine Plan.
THE awful invasion of sin frustrated the divine intention, destroyed it even in its type and model. Man aspired to be as God; and, from that fatal moment, his great quarrel with his Maker has been a determination to assert a state of independence altogether alien to his nature and condition. The standard of revolt was then erected, and the history of all his subsequent conduct has been the history of an insane endeavor to construct an empire, governed by laws and replenished with resources, independent of God. The idolatry and sensuality, the unbelief, irreligion, and all the multiform sins of man, are resolvable into this proud and infernal attempt. Having by his apostasy cut himself off from God, he affects to be a god to himself, to be his own sufficiency, his own first and last. Such, however, is the intimate dependence of man on man that it is impossible for him to attempt to realize this enormous fiction without being brought, at every step, into violent collision with the interest of his fellows. Love to God is the all-combining principle which was to hold each individual in adhesion to all the rest, and the whole in affinity with God; the loss of that, therefore, like the loss of the great law of attraction in the material world, leaves all the several parts in a state of repulsion to each other, as well as the whole disjoined from God. Having lost its proper center in God, the world attempts not to find any common point of repose, but spends itself in fruitless efforts to meet an infinity of independent interests. Every kingdom and province, every family, every individual, discovers a propensity to insulate himself from the common brotherhood, and to constitute himself the center of an all-subordinating and ever-enlarging circle. Such is the natural egotism of the heart that each individual, following his unrestrained bent, acts as if he were a whole kingdom in himself, and as if the general well-being depended on subjection to his supremacy. Setting up for himself, to the exclusion of every other being, he would fain be his own end—the reason of all he does. Under the disorganizing influence of sin, then, the tendency of mankind is toward a state of universal misanthropy; and were it not that some of their selfish ends can be attained only by partial confederations, the world would disband, society in all its forms would break up, every man's hand would be turned into a weapon, and all the earth become a battle-field, in which the issues to be decided would be as numerous as the combatants, so that the conflict could end only with the destruction of every antagonist. There is, be it observed, a wide difference between selfishness and legitimate self-love. This is a principle necessary to all sentient existence. In man, it is the principle which impels him to preserve his own life, and promote his own happiness. Not only is it consistent with piety, it is the stock on which all piety, in lapsed man, is grafted. Piety is only the principle of self-love, carried out in the right direction, and seeking its supreme happiness in God. It is the act or habit of a man who so loves himself that he gives himself to God. Selfishness is fallen self-love. It is self-love in excess, blind to the existence and excellence of God, and seeking its happiness in inferior objects, by aiming to subdue them to its own purposes.—Mammon.