Fatherhood Quote by Edwin Hubbel Chapin

Pride sits at the top of Chapin's moral hierarchy not because it looks flashy, but because it looks plausible. Calling it "the master sin of the devil" frames arrogance as the engine that powers every other collapse: once the self is enthroned, everything else becomes negotiable. In a single move, he turns pride from a private feeling into a structural danger, the kind that quietly authorizes cruelty, hypocrisy, and self-exemption.

The second clause is the dagger. "The devil is the father of lies" does more than quote Christian tradition; it links the psychology of pride to the mechanics of deception. Pride needs a story to keep itself intact. If you're always right, then inconvenient facts must be reframed, dissenters must be discredited, and failures must be blamed elsewhere. The subtext is that pride doesn't merely accompany lying; it breeds it. The lie becomes pride's protective shell.

Chapin is writing as a 19th-century American clergyman, speaking into a culture intoxicated with progress, reputation, and public virtue. In that context, his warning reads less like medieval demonology and more like social critique: the respectable sinner is often the most dangerous one, because pride can dress itself up as principle, patriotism, even piety. The rhetorical force comes from its tight causal chain - pride leads to self-deception, which leads to deception of others - and from its refusal to treat evil as exotic. The devil here isn't a gothic villain; he's the logical endpoint of a self that can't bear to be wrong.