Let your old age be childlike, and your childhood like old age; that is, so that neither may your wisdom be with pride, nor your humility without wisdom.
Ask for what end the heavenly bodies shine,
Earth for whose use? Pride answers, 'Tis for mine
For me kind nature wakes her genial power,
Suckles each herb, and spreads out every flower.
Vanity and pride are different things, though the words are often used synonymously. A person may be proud without being vain. Pride relates more to our opinion of ourselves; vanity, to what we would have others think of us.
Well, I find it interesting first that this all centers around the issue of homosexuality and we don't bring in any other sin issue into the picture - the ones that are running rampant within our churches largely go unaddressed. Issues of pride and judgment and gossip and slander and other types of sexual immorality, gluttony, you name it.
William James once made an acute point about the relationship between happiness and expectation. He argued that satisfaction with ourselves does not require us to succeed in every endeavour. We are not always humiliated by failing; we are humiliated only if we first invest our pride and sense of worth in a given achievement and then do not reach it.
Not in nature but in man is all the beauty and worth he sees. The world is very empty, and is indebted to this gilding, exalting soul for all its pride.