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Updated: May 20, 2025
The Bishop might have said that this should teach us not to try and seize all the good things we could, and that the reason of it was not, as the old Greeks thought, that the gods envied the prosperity of mortals, but that our prosperity was often dashed very wisely and tenderly from our lips, because one of the worst foes that a man can have, one of the most blinding and bewildering of faults, is the sense of self-sufficiency and security.
His sagacity had been caricatured as cunning; his presence of mind taken for vulgar audacity; he was held up as a half-educated debater, filled with a miserable self-sufficiency. He was attacked as a demagogue. The East held itself aloof from him in unctuous self-righteousness, because of his stand in the Mexican War. His fight for Oregon had aligned against him the friends of England in America.
The rich seem to be those among whom will occur hereafter the sharpest reverses, if I understand aright the parable of the rich man and Lazarus. Who has not known the insolence of their meanness toward the poor, all the time counting themselves of the very elect! What riches and fancied religion, with the self-sufficiency they generate between them, can make man or woman capable of, is appalling.
It seems fair to argue from these instances that Disraeli, with all his imagination and insight, did not, even in 1876, understand the constitutional and social self-sufficiency of the greater colonies; or the nature of the bond which held them fast to the mother country.
Painters in ordinary society, or in obscure situations where their value is not known, and they are treated with neglect and indifference, have sometimes a forward self-sufficiency of manner; but this is not so much their fault as that of others. Perhaps their want of regular education may also be in fault in such cases.
Finally, he expounds the relation of Reward and Punishment to the law of Nature; the obligation of it is before and distinct from these; but, while full of admiration for the Stoical idea of the self-sufficiency of virtue, he is constrained to add that 'men never will generally, and indeed 'tis not very reasonably to be expected they should, part with all the comforts of life, and even life itself, without any expectation of a future recompense. The 'manifold absurdities' of Hobbes being first exposed, he accordingly returns, in pursuance of the theological argument of his Lectures, to show that the eternal moral obligations, founded on the natural differences of things, are at the same time the express will and command of God to all rational creatures, and must necessarily and certainly be attended with Rewards and Punishments in a future state.
Where was her pride now? where the scorn she had exhibited to so many suitors? where her coquetry and her self-sufficiency her love of being loved, with the power to hate the lover? The enchantress was now taught what the passion was, in all its despair as well as delight. She cried aloud. She cared not for the presence of the messengers.
Most men are secretly proud of their triumph with woman their ability to triumph and any evidence of their ability to attract, entertain, hold, is one of those things which tends to give them an air of superiority and self-sufficiency which is sometimes lacking in those who are not so victorious. This was, in its way, his first victory of the sort, and it pleased him mightily.
The most delicate repetitions of mispronounced words, the subtlest substitution of society phrases for factory idioms, fell blunted against an impenetrable ignorance and self-sufficiency. Short of dropping the pose of companion and boldly rapping a pupil on the knuckles, there seemed to her no way of modifying her mistress.
The Christians could hate, too, and they hated the idolaters who gloried with haughty self-sufficiency in their intellectual inheritance; the traditions of a brilliant past.
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