These are cheerful instances of its development, and its advantages; they would suggest that some external opposition or friction is necessary for such temperaments that their fighting instinct may be directed against the common enemy, and not tend to arouse controversies and discussions in its own ranks or within itself.

In less happy cases the instinct of opposition is a cause of endless trouble, friction in family life, difficulty in working with others, "alarums, excursions" on all sides, and worse, the get attitude of distrust towards authority, which undermines the foundations of faith and prepares the mind to break away from control, to pass from instinctive opposition to antagonism, from antagonism to contempt, from contempt to rebellion and revolt.

Arrogance of mind, irreverence, self-idolatry, blindness, follow in their course, and the whole nature loses its balance and becomes through pride a pitiful wreck.
The assenting mind has its own possibilities for good and evil, more human than those of Nonconformity, for "pride was not made for men" (Ecclus.

x 22), less liable to great catastrophes, and in general better adapted for all that belongs to the service of God and man.

It is a happy endowment, and the happiness of others is closely bound up with its own.