Odious passions
Let them he held up in the clear exposure of Wisdom, that their very mention may suggest their hideousness.
I. MALICE AND ITS DEVICES. (Proverbs 3:29.) Literally, "Forge not ill against thy neighbour."
1. Malice, like love, is all-inventive. But as the devices of the latter are the very instruments of progress and good, so those of the former are pernicious—burglar's tools, cunning instruments of torture.
2. Directed against unsuspecting objects, malice is truly Satanic, an inspiration from hell. We have to beware of indulgence in curiosity about our neighbours; it is seldom free from some taint of malice in thought, which may pass over at any moment into action. Something in our neighbour's life may rebuke us and rouse the latent passion. How near are the angel and the devil to one another in the heart!
II. UNPROVOKED CONTENTIOUSNESS. (Proverbs 3:30.) In other words, quarrelsomeness. The vicious habit and disposition to "pick quarrels," to invent occasions for faultfinding, for the exercise of pugnacity, and so on. The man of whom it is said that if left alone in the world he would fight with his own shadow. Let him contend with his own vices, of which this temper is a symptom, and expend his pugnacity upon the evils of society. There are men before whose presence all the sleeping germs of wrath start up into chaotic life. Could they but see themselves as others see them!
III. ENVY OF THE WICKED GREAT. (Proverbs 3:31.) As emulation of the virtuous great is a noble passion, this, the reverse side of it, is correspondingly base. Imitation, again, is a powerful passion, the source of "fashion." The pure spirit knows nothing of fashion as such; and immoral fashion, born of mere imitation, it must avoid and. denounce.
1. Every passion has its obverse and its reverse, its good and its evil side; malice may be turned to benevolence; idle quarrelsomeness to noble pugnacity; immoral envy to pure emulation.
2. Religion intensifies, purifies, directs, the passions to noble ends.—J.