s because children have no right to be proud.
If He resists the proud, it is in fatherly love, because it is bad for
them to be proud. Not because the proud are injuring God, but because
they are injuring themselves, does God resist them, and bring them low,
and show them what they are, and where they are, that they may repent,
and be converted, and turned back into the right way.

Remember always that God is your Father. This question, like all
questions between God and man, is a question between a father and a
child; and if you see it in any other light, and judge it by any other
rule, you see it and judge it wrongly, and learn nothing about it, or
worse than nothing. If God were really angry with, really hated, the
proud man, or any other man, would He need only to resist him? would He
have to wait till the next life to punish him? My dear friends, if God
really hated you or me, do you not suppose that He would simply destroy
us--get rid of us--abolish us and annihilate us off the face of the
earth, just as we crush a gnat when it bites us?

That God can do; and more--He does it now and then. He will endure with
much long suffering vessels of wrath, fitted to destruction: but a
moment sometimes comes when He will endure them no longer, and He
destroys them with the destruction for which they have fitted themselves.
In them is fulfilled the parable of the rich man, who said to himself,
"Soul, thou hast much good laid up for many years; take thine ease, eat,
drink, and be merry. But God said unto him, Thou fool, this night thy
soul shall be required of thee."

But for the most part, thanks to the mercy of our Heavenly Father, we are
not destroyed by our pride and for our pride. We are only chastened, as
a father chastens his child. And that we are chastised for pride, who
does not know? What proverb more common, what proverb more true, than
that after pride comes a fall? Do we not know (if we do not, we shall
know sooner or later) that the surest way to fail in any undertaking is
to set about it in self-will and self-conceit; that the surest way to do
a foolish thing, is to fancy that we are going to do a very wise one;
that the surest way to make ourselves ridiculous in the eyes of our
fellow-men, is to assume airs, and boast, shew ourselves off, and end by
shewing off only our own folly?

Why is it so? Why has God so ordered the world and human nature, that
pride punis