4 Sermon Illustrations on Self-Centeredness

A seamstress whom I know was sewing in the home of a wealthy woman in one of the aristocratic suburbs of Boston. She was there every day for nearly a week, when finally her patience became exhausted and she left the house never to return.

She said she could stand being fed on crackers and milk every day at the noon meal, but when she heard the mistress of the house at the telephone ordering half a chicken for her pet dogs she could withhold her wrath no longer.

Of course, the good woman of the house was sweetly unconscious of the absurd comparison between the dogs’ food and the food for the seamstress. Had she had any sense of the meanness of her conduct, she never would have telephoned that message within the hearing of the seamstress.

The truth of the matter was that her heart--as much as she had left of it--was all wrapt up in her pet dogs, and her interest in human beings had become as a matter of habit, simply a question of the amount of service they could render her. She is probably whining to-day about the seamstress who didn’t know her place and who was jealous of people who had means.--GEORGE W. COLEMAN, “Searchlights.”

Provincialism is local pride unduly inflated. It is the temper that is ready to hail as a Swan of Avon any local gosling who has taught himself to make an unnatural use of his own quills. It is always tempting us to stand on tiptoe to proclaim our own superiority. It prevents our seeing ourselves in proper proportion to the rest of the world. It leads to the preparation of school manuals in which the threescore years and ten of American literature are made equal in importance to the thousand years of literature produced in Great Britain. It tends to render a modest writer, like Longfellow, ridiculous by comparing him implicitly with the half-dozen world poets. In the final resort, no doubt, every people must be the judge of its own authors; but before that final judgment is rendered every people consults the precedents, and measures its own local favorites by the cosmopolitan and eternal standards.

— BRANDER MATTHEWS