James 3:14 But if you have bitter envying and strife in your hearts, glory not, and lie not against the truth. I. WHAT ENVY IS, AND WHEREIN THE NATURE OF IT CONSISTS. Moralists generally give us this description of it: that it is a depraved affection or passion of the mind, disposing a man to hate or malign another for some good or excellency belonging to him, which the envious person judges him unworthy of, and which for the most part he wants himself. Or yet more briefly: envy is a certain grief of mind conceived upon the sight of another's felicity, whether real or supposed. So that we see that it consists partly of hatred, and partly of grief. In respect of which two passions, and the proper actings of both, we are to observe, that as it shows itself in hatred, it strikes at the person envied; but as it affects a man in the nature of grief, it recoils and does execution upon the envier; both of them are hostile affections, and vexatious to the breast which harbours them. II. WHAT ARE THE GROUNDS AND CAUSES OF ENVY. 1. On the part of the person envying. (1) Great malice and baseness of nature. (2) An unreasonable grasping ambition. It is remarked of Alexander as a very great fault, and, in truth, of that nature, that one would wonder how it could fall upon so great a spirit, namely, that he would sometimes carp at the valorous achievements of his own captains. He thought that whatsoever praise was bestowed upon another was taken from him. (3) Another cause of envy is an inward sense of a man's own weakness and inability to attain what he desires and would aspire to. (4) Idleness often makes men envy the high offices, honours, and accomplishments of others. 2. On the part of the person envied. (1) Great abilities and endowments of nature. (2) The favour of princes and great persons. (3) Wealth, riches, and prosperity. (4) A fair credit, esteem, and reputation in the world. III. THE EFFECTS AND CONSEQUENCES OF ENVY. 1. First of all, this ill quality brings confusion and calamity upon the envious person himself who cherishes and entertains it, and, like the viper, gnaws out the bowels which first conceived it. It is indeed the only act of justice that it does, that the guilt it brings upon a man it revenges upon him too, and so torments and punishes him much more than it can afflict or annoy the person who is envied by him. We know what the poet says of envy; and it is with the strictest truth, without the least hyperbole, that Phalaris's brazen hull, and all the arts of torment invented by the greatest masters of them, the Sicilian tyrants, were not comparable to those that the tyranny of envy racks the mind of man with. For it ferments and boils in the soul, putting all the powers of it into the most restless and disorderly agitation. 2. In the next place, consider the effects of envy, in respect of the object of it, or the person envied; and these may be reduced to the following three. (1) A busy, curious inquiry, or prying into all the concerns of the person envied and maligned; and this, no doubt, only as a step or preparative to those further mischiefs which envy assuredly drives at. (2) Calumny, or detraction. Has a man done bravely, and got himself a reputation too great to be borne down by any base and direct aspersions? Why, then, envy will seemingly subscribe to the general vogue in many or most things; but then it will be sure to come over him again with a sly oblique stroke in some derogating but or other, and so slide in some scurvy exception, which shall effectually stain all his other virtues; and like the dead fly in the apothecary's ointment, which (Solomon tells us) never fails to give the whole an offensive savour. (3) The last and grand effect of envy, in respect of the person envied, is his utter ruin and destruction; for nothing less was intended from the very first, whatsoever comes to be effected in the issue.Lessons: 1. The extreme vanity of even the most excellent and best esteemed enjoyments of this world. Shadows do not more naturally attend shining bodies than envy pursues worth and merit, always close at the very heels of them, and like a sharp blighting east wind, still blasting and killing the noblest and most promising productions of virtue in their earliest bud; and, as Jacob did Esau, supplants them in their very birth. 2. This may convince us of the safety of the lowest, and the happiness of a middle condition. Only power and greatness are prize for envy; whose evil eye always looks upwards, and whose hand scorns to strike where it can place its foot. Life and a bare competence are a quarry too low for so stately a vice-as envy to fly at. And therefore men of a middle condition are indeed doubly happy. (1) That, with the poor, they are not the objects of pity; nor (2) with the rich and great, the mark of envy. 3. We learn from hence the necessity of a man's depending upon something without him, higher and stronger than himself, even for the preservation of his ordinary concerns in this life. Nothing can be a greater argument to make a man fly, and cast himself into the arms of Providence, than a due consideration of the nature and the workings of envy. (R. South, D. D.) Parallel Verses KJV: But if ye have bitter envying and strife in your hearts, glory not, and lie not against the truth. |
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