By "the pride of man" and "the strife of tongues" we may understand the whole of that cruel and disturbing interference of one man's life with another's which may take such an endless variety of forms.
I. There are two different attitudes which almost all men take towards the tendency of the life around us to swallow up and drown our personality. It is strange to see how, long before they come to middle age, almost all men, except the lowest and the highest, all men of strong character who have not reached some religious conception of their true relations to the world, have either become defiant of the world, setting themselves in obtrusive independence against its claims, or else have tried in some way to withdraw themselves from it and let the world go its way, determined that they will not be sacrificed to its importunate demand. We know both spirits, and we know that both are bad. The first makes a man hard and brutal, and the second makes a man selfish and self-conceited.
II. Notice, next, how it is that in Christianity the refuge of God is thrown wide open to men who are tired with, and who feel the danger of, the world. (1) The release and refuge of Christianity consists in the way it brings the soul into communion with God. "Thou wilt keep him in the secret of Thy presence." This means that when a man is spiritually conscious of the presence of God it secludes and separates him from every other presence. You are with others, and yet you are alone with Him. They parade their foolish vanities before you, and you hardly see them. It is as if a bright fly fluttered its impertinent finery between you and the west when you were looking at a gorgeous sunset. He has blinded you to all beside Himself. (2) True Christian faith develops and strengthens individuality in each of us. The reason why the talk of people about us, their pride and arrogance, their intrusion upon our life, hurts us so, gives us so much pain, and does us so much harm, is the weakness of our own sense of personality. A true Christian faith starts with the truth of a personal redemption, and leads the man up to personal duties. When he takes up his work and does it, he can no more be frightened out of it than the man to whom Jesus had given his bed to carry from Bethesda up the street to his own house could have been scared by all the curious gaping of the crowd and driven back to the dreary place under the porches where he had lain for thirty-eight long years.
III. The third element of the freedom which Christianity gave to its servants was in the value that it taught them to place upon the talk of the world, upon what David calls "the strife of tongues." (1) It is good for us often to know how superficial, how lightly made, how soon forgotten, are the judgments of our brethren which sound so solemn, and which tyrannise over us so. Such a feeling sets us free, and makes us independent. (2) There is one other thing more helpful than this; and that is the way in which Christianity, by putting us into true relations to our fellow-men, saves us from falling into false relations to them. There is no escape from the slavery of other men like that which comes of the intelligent and earnest service of other men.
Phillips Brooks, Sermons,p. 78.
References: Psalms 31:22. Spurgeon, Sermons,vol. xix., No. 1146, and vol. xxvii., No. 1589; J. M. Neale, Sermons on Passages of the Psalms,p. 67. Psalms 31:23. Spurgeon, Sermons,vol. vi., No. 325; J. E. Vaux, Sermon Notes,3rd series, p. 38. Psalms 31 A. Maclaren, Life of David,p. 132.Psalms 32:1. J. Keble, Sermons from Lent to Passiontide,p. 260; H. Thompson, Concionalia: Outlines for Parochial Use,1st series, vol. i., p. 117; Sermons for Boys and Girls,p. 328.