As Christians, we are told in scripture - and if you are not, common sense with a little of common decency implores you - to help others. The Christian virtue of charity. I don't know what atheists call this. We are also warned not to be proud about anything and God has promised to humble the proud and exalt the humble. Again, if you are not a Christian, common sense tells you helping someone and bragging about it is not really helping. You are merely using that person as a means to satisfy your own pride. Which of course needs to be fed constantly.

So in the course of you helping someone. That is, practising charity and humility, you may actually in turn just feeding your pride. I wish to bring some of these ways the devil has been hitherto successful in deceiving us in presenting pride as humility.

The best way to approach this is to say that we need to give. But if we find within us the need to be needed so we can give then we are on the wrong track which is pride. Let me explain. The proper aim of giving is to put the recipient in a state where he no longer needs our gift. We feed children in order that they may soon be able to feed themselves; we teach them in order that they may soon not need our teaching. Thus a heavy task is laid upon us. We must work towards our own abdication. We must aim at making ourselves superfluous. The hour when we can say "They need me no longer" should be our reward. But when we fear being no longer needed because we are proud, the ravenous need to be needed will gratify itself either by keeping its objects needy or by inventing for them imaginary needs. It will do this all the more ruthlessly because it thinks (in one sense truly) that it is charity and therefore regards itself as "unselfish" when it is really pride.

It is not only mothers who can do this. All those other affections which, whether by derivation from parental instinct or by similarity of function, need to be needed may fall into the same pit. In Jane Austen's novel, Emma intends that Harriet Smith should have a happy life; but only the sort of happy life which Emma herself has planned for her. My own profession - that of a university teacher - is in this way dangerous. Another illusion is when you can very well help a man to sort of "be a man" but because of that need to be needed which you mistakenly call charity but which is actually pride, you "help" him in such a way that ensures his return to you. If we are any good we must always be working towards the moment at which our pupils are fit to become our critics and rivals. We should be delighted when it arrives, as the fencing master is delighted when his pupil can pink and disarm him.

We are told in scripture to be as gentle as doves but as wise as serpents. Be gentle - humble and charitable and wise - intelligent and smart. Christ was making a statement of fact.