Theodicy and Commerce

Theodicy

The publication of Gottfried Leibniz’s Theodicy in 1710 represents an original contribution to modern philosophical inquiry into the problem of evil. For Leibniz this problem was ancient and yet partially new. ⁴ At issue is the manner of evil’s existence, which for him is threefold—metaphysical, physical, and moral. ‘Metaphysical evil consists in mere imperfection, physical evil in suffering, and moral evil in sin.’ ⁵ The way of moral evil’s entry into the world was accepted and readily understood; human beings introduce it by routinely committing wrongful acts. Occurrences of natural, or what Leibniz also refers to as ‘physical evil’, on the other hand, require a different approach altogether. God could only have created the best of all possible worlds; a world of such superiority that ‘if the smallest evil that comes to pass in the world were missing in it, it would no longer be this world’. ⁶ This is possible because God has ‘ordered all things beforehand once for all, having foreseen prayers, good and bad actions, and all the rest’. ⁷ Everything that exists makes rational sense; every part contributes to the universal whole; the totality of things being what the twentieth-century commentator Arthur Lovejoy referred to as the ‘great chain of being’. ⁸ Irrespective of where monads are physically located or what properties they possess, the decisive issue is whether some of the near infinity of created monads became, or were originally created, evil. Leibniz’s claim is that God as a perfect harmony of attributes could have done none other than create the best of all possible worlds and therefore any occurrence of evil is a ‘necessary contingency’ of God’s initial creative enterprise.

William King’s theodicy presented in De Origine Mali, likewise, put an enlightenment twist on Augustinian privation by arguing that God could not have created an absolutely perfect world because only God can be absolutely perfect and therefore to create another absolutely perfect entity would be to duplicate himself, which is impossible. Evils humans encounter are but necessary ‘imperfections’. Parts are less perfect than the whole and the whole is less perfect than God, and so we must admit, thinks King, that God, ‘though infinitely good and powerful, could not separate things from the concomitant evils of imperfection’. ⁹ As commentators have pointed out, King is doing nothing less than implying evils are ‘not only consistent with infinite wisdom, goodness and power, but necessarily resulting from them’. Describing evil as logically necessary was, moreover, no small departure from the Christian tradition on the subject. The Christian tradition had considered evil as a kind of non-being, or privation, and creaturely imperfection before the Fall a theological mistake. What happens to creation is a result of its own will, as it were, and not a result of God having foreordained such evil or suffering in that time before time. On the theodicist view, at any rate, the kinds and degrees of evil that exist in the world are of ultimate good for the world. The task for humanity—according to Leibniz and King, anyway—is thus to gain better understanding of evil’s place in the great hierarchy of being and accept it for what it is. If evil is a fact of life, everyone had all better come to terms with God’s mysterious reasons for allowing it.

As it pertains to our central question of how the logic of theodicy contributed to shifting notions of commerce in the eighteenth century, what concerns us about these responses to the problem of evil issued by Leibniz and King is the way they understand and depict the created world. Creation is complete, without contingency, and wholly determined. Commentators have rightly described the view as rationally optimistic; a supreme, self-contained organization of parts divinely hurled down the corridors of time. The rational optimist, it is worth reiterating, believes that all other possible worlds are worse than the present world and that the greater and more grotesque the evils, the greater the triumph of the God who prevails upon them. Perfection of the whole depends paradoxically upon imperfection in its parts. But the optimist, whose curious intellectual position was that of seeing the present as the best of all possible worlds, turned out to be more malcontent with the world than he originally thought, later amending his position to allow for obvious scientific, political and economic progresses. It is perhaps one of those bizarre eighteenth-century paradoxes that the best of all possible worlds would also be considered an organism of perpetual improvement.

Not all were so optimistic. In the wake of destruction left by the Lisbon earthquake of 1755, Voltaire’s poetic lament at worldly optimism breaks through with piercing truth: ‘You cry “all is good” with one voice lamentable!’ Voltaire’s grievance was not so much with the optimism of the theodicists as it was with the disconcerting idea that ‘the actual evils we experience appear yet worse by representing them as inevitable and inherent in the permanent structure of the universe’. ¹⁰ An unexplained evil is perhaps preferable to an evil explained. Is it really so bad, asks Voltaire, to respond to the despairing question of ‘why did this have to happen?’ with an empathetic and consoling silence? David Bentley Hart, writing in the aftermath of a more recent natural disaster, the 2004 Tsunami, explains Voltaire’s contention as a specific rejection of

a God who directly governs a cosmos that is exactly as he intended it (or as he had intended it), balancing out all its many eventualities and particularities in a sort of infinite equation that leaves no remainder—no irredeemable evil, no irrecuperable absurdity—behind. ¹¹

Voltaire is critical of the view that casts God in terms of pure will, who disallows freedom to his creatures and therefore wishes to explain away all instances of evil and suffering as essential to his Divine intent.

But that is not the only problem with theodicies of the Leibnizian stripe; there is also the implicitly troublesome enterprise of man attempting to justify God—theos-dike—that smacks very much of a devolution of authority. Does this not reverse the priority of the gospel itself, making man the justifier of God rather than of God justifying man? Hegel, for one, seems to have seen Leibniz’s God as a creature fashioned in our own image; a vendor in the common marketplace selling only what’s available: It does no good to complain about the quality of the produce on offer, since it is, in point of fact, the best to be had. ¹² One also wonders, moreover, whether one is obliged not only to accept evil and suffering, but also to hope for it, if indeed every occurrence of evil is the origin of some greater good, as theodicies imply. Perhaps, as has been suggested, we ought not to lament the bad things that happen to people but instead consider them fortunate to have exceptional opportunities for achieving heightened states of nobility. ¹³ A strange wish, perhaps, but not one wholly unbiblical:

my brethren, count it all joy when you fall into various trials, knowing that the testing of your faith produces patience. But let patience have its perfect work, that you may be perfect and complete, lacking nothing. (James 1:2–4)

But what, if anything, does theodicy have to do with commerce? In tracking the development of theodicy-logic through to the late-century triumph of capitalism, it would be useful to turn our attention from the justification of evils and focus expressly on the moral and theological implications a Leibnizian view of the world yields. First, we noted, albeit implicitly, that Providence is on this account almost entirely frontloaded. The evils that presently obtain are not being redeemed per se, but were planned at the outset to transform after their appearance in the world into greater goods. Second, and this follows from the first, it was seen that maintaining a view of this kind required a degree of rational optimism that perceives evil as a necessary condition to the continued proliferation of good. Unintended as it no doubt was, what emerged naturally in subsequent decades from the theodicist’s adoration of this world’s stunning superiority was an overvaluing of determinacy, rational comprehension, and progress. From an empirical point of view, therefore, any phenomenon that seems ultimately to benefit society in some form is immediately comprehended as ‘good’ for society. And this is the crucial point: providence of the Leibnizian variety comes to express itself as rigid and totalizing Will authorizing everything that comes to pass. What happens simply is God’s will, full stop. The trouble with this view, in the end, is what would result from it. This particular version of Providence and its expression within a decidedly Newtonian natural law became susceptible to exaggerations and progressive expansions that sought to comprehend all of human experience as necessary and ultimately beneficial. Providence and natural law swiftly became fused. To illustrate this identification, it is to the later eighteenth-century commercial theory that we should now turn, focusing our attention on two of the dominant voices of this discussion, David Hume and Adam Smith.

Commerce

It has been said that at least one critical turning point in the early-modern age was the ‘dissolution of reality into subjective states of mind’. ¹⁴ On an ethical level this dissolution worked itself out gradually over the first half of the eighteenth century, coming to equilibrium—or at least to its logical conclusion—in the thought of David Hume. Theodicists, motivated by the need to explain the occurrence of evil, inadvertently instilled a zealous optimism in the minds of early eighteenth-century moral and political theorists. Shaftsbury and Pope are ideal examples in this regard; the latter going so far as to suggest, ‘in spite of Pride, in erring Reason’s spite, one truth is clear, whatever is, is Right’. ¹⁵ What was adopted and modified conveniently by later eighteenth-century thinkers, Hume and Smith included, was the immediate recognition of truth. A perfectly created world governed by laws of a providential Deity means that the mind’s perception and comprehension of reality is not likely mistaken, the authority natural law imposes upon reality being increasingly attributed to mind itself. This optimistic faith in the absolute truthfulness of reality’s presentation through the natural law and the certainty of mind to comprehend this presentation opened modern imaginations to an inherently progressive view of society.

With the Anglophone reception of Pufendorf in the early part of the eighteenth century, Whig history gradually became a dominant interpretation of historical change later utilized gleefully by theorists of the Scottish enlightenment. Hume, in particular, uses his multi-volume History of England ¹⁶ to narrate the negative consequences of monarchical infringement upon civil liberties (especially economic ones) and on a wider view to frame that historical narrative with strikingly progressive bravado. Progress is secured and energized by free government with a mixed constitution that encourages commercial refinement. Civil society is capable of becoming greater and greater if it could but establish the political and commercial freedoms necessary for increased luxury and refinement. The story has several movements—from monarchical to mixed government, regulated trade to free trade, and even superstitious religion to natural religion—but no matter which thematic variation one chooses the central plot remains the same: progress is intrinsic to civil society.

Another superb example of this conjectural model is observable in Adam Smith’s modification of Pufendorf’s ‘four-stage’ historiographic narrative. The four stages outlined in Smith’s Lectures on Jurisprudence ¹⁷ —hunter, shepherd, agriculture, and commerce—designate epochs in the history of communities, each signifying a unique constitutional transition. Society began as a collection of hunters with no conception of private property and no institutions upon which to found a government. When it was recognized that objects, particularly livestock, could be personally possessed this recognition initiated the first transition from hunter to shepherd. From the shepherd stage emerged the first semblances of monarchy, as one individual by virtue of capacity or resources became naturally acknowledged to lead and govern. Separating the shepherd from the agricultural stage was the notion of possessing territorial lands, whereby a mere chieftain could soon become a consecrated king. Land is thus no longer common. In turn, society takes the form of extreme hierarchy. The landless are increasingly controlled by the landed, for the soil is this society’s most precious commodity. The age of commerce that arises from the ashes of agriculture tends on Smith’s account to begin with expanded domestic and international trade. From hunter to ‘stock jobber’, the movement of history tells a story of how humankind moves ‘from Savage to Scotsman’.

Central to Smith’s account, furthermore, is the conviction that each transition into a new constitutional epoch represents a positive improvement established by Divine providence. In part six of Theory of Moral Sentiments, Smith asserts that humankind benefits from the universal benevolence of a God who ‘directs all the movements of nature, and who is determined, by his own unalterable perfections, to maintain in it, at all times, the greatest possible quantity of happiness’. ¹⁸ Our Maker’s universal benevolence is thus simultaneously progressive and felicitous: his mission in the world being to amend abject circumstances and strengthen weakened sentiments for the sole purpose of creaturely progress and enjoyment. This demonstrates vividly just how far the dissolution of reality into subjectivity had gone. The best world, for Smith, was a world where God not only planned to rectify evil, but also sought to make his creatures maximally happy. The question for our purposes is how, exactly, Providence was identified with man’s best interest, and from man’s point of view?

By the mid-eighteenth century the idea of natural religion had gained full purchase in the Scottish intellectual milieu, surpassing the traditional position reserved only for revealed religion. God’s self-disclosure could be observed vividly in the sublime design of natural creation. What he has done and what he wishes to do in the world are deduced entirely from the natural law, or from the way things ordinarily seem to go in the world. Comprehending divine intentions in the natural law would in turn promote human reason to the status of vice-regent; the law itself relying for its authority on how reason understood it. The natural law thus becomes identified with the energy of providence. God acts according to the natural law—that is quite simply how he acts. That God’s intentions for humankind would soon be considered inherently progressive was simply a matter of course. God would want what the natural law disclosed and could be immediately comprehended by observers. This is not to say that Scottish theorists neglected the Scripture altogether, many including William Robertson and Adam Ferguson certainly did not; it is simply to say that the popular view among those in persuasive positions was inclined toward purely natural authority.

If theodicy promised the vindication of God for allowing evil, what were the promises of commerce? For Hume, those possibilities were endless. A good place to start would be to jettison policies requiring an international balance of trade. Abolishing trade balance policies, the theory went, allowed for fluctuating or floating deficits, either in import or export, and would ultimately better serve both the importer and the exporter by generating increased capital for both parties. Once trade imbalances are permitted capital can be exponentially multiplied. Until the late eighteenth century, ‘superfluity’, or capital gains, had been directed conventionally to the coffers of the sovereign to dispense as was deemed necessary. More often than not this extra capital would be redirected to recent war efforts or to the one soon to be strategized. Hume’s claim, conversely, was that capital would be better utilized if reapplied to the enterprises of those that originally earned it. Under the old arrangement, where the capital resulting from labour and trade was devoted to the sovereign and subsequently poured into his bottomless war chest, domestic happiness and international ascendancy were in perpetual competition with one another. On the new arrangement, however, when capital is brought to serve in the refinement of arts and luxury, the return on that investment is gleaned with interest and the refinements that follow lead to still greater refinements, and luxuries to still grander luxuries. In reality, insisted Hume, war siphons public happiness and functions much like a heavy tax, and one ‘vastly less felt by those addicted to arms’. ¹⁹ The advantageous truth of applying capital towards refinement is that ‘industry and arts and trade increase the power of the sovereign as well as the happiness of the subjects’. ²⁰ Commerce, if properly conceived in terms of applying capital to the refinement of arts, actually eliminates the tension between greatness and happiness by promoting national greatness and increasing public happiness while at the same time avoiding the tragedies and expenditures of armed conflict. Natural law thus works to distil economic tensions and paradoxes into benefits and advantages.

The best means for generating capital is by international trade. By trading internationally a nation is likely to maintain the highest advantage in supply and demand ratios while concurrently avoiding the stagnation and disadvantage that defines purely domestic exchanges. Hume’s argument on this point hinges on the usefulness of wealth to achieve these ends: ‘Where riches are in few hands, these must enjoy all the power, and will readily conspire to lay the whole burden on the poor and oppress them still further, to the discouragement of all industry.’ ²¹ The more widely dispersed the wealth of any nation is among its people, the lighter the burden on each shoulder and the freer it is to improve refinement and luxury. A blow to domestic advantage is felt wherever the freedom to trade is hedged. As a working definition of luxury Hume suggests provisionally ‘a great refinement in the gratification of the senses, any degree of [which] may be innocent or blameworthy according to the age, or country, or condition of the person’. ²² Luxury is a peculiar moral concept that only becomes problematic when one’s character manifests glaring excesses or deficiencies. Escaping the dangers of wealth by what he calls ‘monkishly’ renouncing it altogether is, for Hume, wholly irrational and cancels out many opportunities for extending generosity. Luxury in itself is ‘neither banal nor blessed’—its moral value is assigned only when personalized and moderated.

As a point of clarification, Hume is not asserting that the morals of wealth are derived only from their use. Rather he is arguing that the morals pertaining to wealth apply both to what a person does with wealth as well as what wealth does to the person. This distinction leads Hume to ‘correct popular opinions’ on the corrupting effects of luxury by suggesting that ages of refinement are both the happiest and most virtuous, and that when luxury ceases to be innocent it also ceases to be beneficial. ²³ The assumption behind Hume’s concept of refinement is that the more refined a people become the less likely they are to indulge excessively. Refinement involves a level of sophistication in pleasure seeking. One does not, for example, gamble one’s money away or spend the better part of it on strong drink; truly refined consumers use wealth for still greater, more worthy refinements, not trivial rewards. Foolish poker players and cash-heavy financiers come quickly to mind as ideal examples in this regard. If any viciousness in the pursuit of luxury appears it is when its innocence sours in toxic excesses and proves itself pernicious. Indolence, selfishness and inattention serve to implicate luxury, taking the illustrative form of either the miser in his greed or the gambler in his spending. Nevertheless both individuals may prove useful to common enterprise, even if accidentally, simply because both display the passion for ‘more’, and this despite the fact that each applies his earnings to different ends. Hume’s larger point, as shall be seen momentarily, is simply this: vice can be advantageous. A moderate view of luxury and refinement provide, paradoxically, the means for still further refinements and luxuries that cannot be rightly attributed to modesty.

Applying this insight to his wider theory of political economy, Hume takes the early eighteenth-century problem of war and commerce—war being engaged for commercial ends and commerce being engaged for the ends of war—and strips it of its impoverished circularity by specifying how international trade leads to national ascendancy and domestic happiness without resorting to war. ²⁴ Greatness is no longer determined by military might or political savvy in the modern commercial age, but by economic standing and the ability of a nation to trade prudently for refinements. Yet if we are to grant this thesis, how does a weak nation become strong or a strong nation become weak? Does this truly improve international inequalities?

The weak state, explains Hume, becomes strong by trading with strong states that can be routinely undersold, and thus bring the weak state to profit. The strong state, by contrast, must simply take care not to risk unwise ventures or to trade too narrowly with too few partners. This unique station of international prominence or ascendancy actually serves in stimulating what Hume calls social ‘jealousies’ that continually ignite and reignite passions for competitive industry. The relation between rich and poor nations is fundamentally jealous. To illustrate, one perhaps thinks here of the ever-manipulative economic tensions between China and the United States, who have effectively turned war itself into an economic battle over trade routes or currency values.

Like many before him, Hume held that the human species individually and collectively progresses toward higher, more improved, and relatively superior states of being. ²⁵ Particularly in his History of England, but elsewhere too, he routinely asserts the inherently progressive nature of humankind. ²⁶ In doing so he departs sharply from the early-century insistence that each person must accept their place in the scale of being and not attempt to alter the presiding order. Instead, a ‘principle of progress’ in human nature is advocated; a passionate longing for higher rank and superior station. The character of this progress is typically presented in terms of procedural or instrumental innovation the salient features of which remain undeniably commercial. Each person has a specific need and is required to join forces with other persons to satisfy those needs. Genius, diligence and custom assist delicate improvements along until eventually the political authorities are forced to decide either between greater liberation of trade, or greater regulation. That decision was in fact the economic quandary of Hume’s day: should rulers liberate international trade or should a rigid balance continue to be enforced? Hume’s advocacy was for liberty, as is well known, but only because the progress of trade promised greater advantages and refinements than alternative theories. Progress was therefore essential to the logic of Hume’s theory of commerce. Decay, the inverse of progress, is simply another opportunity for personal and civic excellences to be cultivated. International trade was thus seen as a natural leveller with a capacity for promoting domestic happiness and charitable support for the poor.

Jealousy is the affective power used to establish equity, national power and public happiness. ‘The French are richer and more affluent than us’, the complainant goes, ‘therefore we must resolve ourselves to trade competitively so that we might soon enjoy the refinements and luxuries our neighbours enjoy’. That is the general assumption behind Hume’s theory of civic jealousy. He maintains throughout his Essays that refinement and luxury encourage felicities that promote national greatness, and that no one need worry about minor damages to social morality. In his essay ‘Of Refinements in the Arts’, Hume claims ‘the increase and consumption of all the commodities which serve to the ornament and pleasure of life are advantageous to society’ and, he later continues, ‘riches are valuable at all times and to all men because they always purchase pleasures such as men are accustomed to and desire: nor can anything restrain or regulate the love of money, but a sense of honour and virtue’.

Envy, covetousness and pride positively encourage the pursuit of refinements and luxuries. No instances of commercial corruption endure, nor does decay really obtain. Certain economic hardships, conflicts, losses or exploitations are integral to the very architecture of any successful modern economy. No real problems or transgressions exist economically speaking, as each instance is redeemed by unseen powers that facilitate a balanced and productive financial machine. Indeed the pursuit of wealth is itself a virtue that when given license cannot corrupt but only mature. The ancient and biblical idea that wealth corrupts virtue has been jettisoned. Hume is persuaded that wealth refines morals and fosters superior prudence. So much, then, for the wisdom of St. Paul: we know that by turning everything to their good God cooperates with all those who love him, with all those that he has called according to his purpose (Rom. 8:28). The love of God and neighbour has been altogether dropped from the commercial equation and replaced with the power of international jealousy.

Linking Theodicy and Commerce: Concluding Implications

Theodicists offered a closed vision of the world, fixed by the natural law, and created in such a way that all evils (or imperfections) are transformed into greater goods. The way the world appears to the observer is quite plainly the way the world really is. Reality is dissolved into subjective perception. Each occurrence of evil in turn requires a solution for letting God off the proverbial hook and for Leibniz and King such a solution was offered on logical grounds: God could do no other than create the best of all possible worlds and therefore the kinds and degrees of evil observable in the world are not really evil, but merely greater goods in temporary disguise; instruments of a totalizing Will bent paradoxically on progressive improvement. There is no hope, properly called, that evils will be redeemed, for evils are merely part of creation’s internal logic. On this account of the natural law the possible ends evil might accomplish somehow justify the means. This understanding highlights what I have followed others in calling the optimistic view of nature’s trajectory: life is as good as it can possibly be! Perhaps most crucial for our purposes, moreover, is the supposition that evil serves a useful role in the ongoing drama of nature’s disclosure; instrumental to the purposes of God and thus a necessary, providential function.

In the ensuing decades, however, natural law came to be identified with providence. Wedded as it was to the already pervasive rational optimism of the period, this identification provoked a conjectural view of history that would serve as a basic tenant of modern political theory. Sentiments shifted from ‘things are as good as they can possibly be!’ to ‘every day and in every way the world keeps getting better and better!’ Human beings and the societies they collectively comprise are inherently progressive. Rational optimism was thus in many respects a natural soil for the flowering of such progressive attitudes. The world seemed to be the best possible world and society appeared to be on the ever-improving rise toward civil refinement and equality. This conceptual development plays a prominent role in the ‘dissolution of reality into subjectivity’. How and why things are the way that they are is how and why I understand them to be the way that they are. Scientific, technological, political and economic advancements abounded in the period, but when applied specifically to newly liberalized international markets progress became a law unto itself; refinements begetting still greater refinements, and luxuries still greater luxuries. The pre-eminence of empirical observation and the primacy of natural reason fused into a treacherous brand of apodictic certainty that when providentially directed and progressively construed sanctified the primal human sentiments that soon became the economy’s raison d’être. To the extent that the variable of progress is still built into modern capitalist models—and one strains their imagination in search of one that isn’t—this tradition of progressivism is still very much with us.

On the Scottish account, wherein passions constitute the principal cause of all actions whatsoever, what mattered most was how humanity felt about its economic goals. They noticed that envy, covetousness and pride made positive contributions to the perpetuation of a socially advantageous commercial system, fuelling the market machine. Loss, exploitation, corruption and criminality are not real hindrances or moral compromises to political economy, but rather necessary resistance to the unrelenting expansion of the marketplace. Competition and jealousy are market goods aiding in the proliferation of refinement and realization of an egalitarian society dedicated to its commercial exercises. Indeed, such moral tensions were instrumental to the further liberalization and expansion of commercial life. And it is here that the logics of theodicy and commerce share a troubling conceptual similarity: both the theodicist and the economist operate from the faulty premises that ends justify means and that evil or injustice or sin is merely an unfortunate but instrumentally necessary part of how God presides over the created order. On one account evil is interpreted as a necessary part of the further proliferation of greater goods, and on the other account moral iniquities are interpreted as advantageous to the commercial expansion and improvement of civil society. It is as impossible for evils to be gratuitous as it is for moral vices in the marketplace to resist capital generation. Scottish thinkers thus inherited not only the optimism upon which modern political economy would be theoretically structured, but also fortified that optimism with moral and theological justifications for excusing the modern marketplace from its moral contradictions. ²⁷ No small wonder, then, that we find in the later eighteenth century, and still find to some degree today, an abstract and deified market doing all the things Providence is petitioned to do and without all the complicated or inconvenient responsibilities attached. Such deification is cast in even starker relief when we recall the premise of theodicy itself, which reverses the priority of the Gospel by presuming to justify a God who since the Fall has set creation at the centre of his redemptive purposes.

Neither Leibniz nor Hume, for example, could ensure that the natural law when left to itself would work all things together for good. Human beings must hope that horrific evils will be redeemed or that certain economic injustices will be remedied. We must hope because our intellectual faculties cannot reach judgments lying so far into the future. When Providence was identified with natural law, however (a natural law now authorized ontologically by natural reason), vices, imperfections and evils could be instrumentalized, furnishing the eighteenth-century economist with a liberal vision of the marketplace that trampled under its refined feet centuries of Christian reflection on righteous economy. Justification of natural evils thus expanded gradually to include justification of moral evils; one impinging upon the occurrence of calamity, the other upon the commitment of iniquity. Perhaps we ought not to speculate further on what shall come of an economic order thusly motivated and keep to the council offered us in the book of James:

Here is the answer for those of you who talk like this: ‘Today or tomorrow we are off to this or that town; we are going to spend a year there trading, and make some money’. You never know what will happen tomorrow: you are no more than a mist that is here for a little while and then disappears. The most you should ever say is: ‘If it is the Lord’s will, we shall still be alive to do this or that’. But how proud and sure of yourselves you are now! Pride of this kind is always wicked. Everyone who knows what is the right thing to do and doesn’t do it commits sin (James 4:13–17).