Detraction - 1917

The Sin of Lust

LUST -- THE SLAVERY OF SIN

“The wages of sin is death.” — Rom. 6: 23.

From the beginning of the world, sin and Satan have made wretched, helpless slaves of innumerable members of the human family. Bound in the chains of guilt, unable to move to work out their glorious destiny, blind and deaf to the true beauties of God’s world and serving him whose servants they have made themselves in a hundred degrading offices; bound perhaps in the bonds of evil habits; bound sometimes forever in the dungeon of hell, where all hope is left behind, where no order but eternal horror abides.

          If this be true, as it undoubtedly is, of all sin, it is especially true of sins of lust. No sin among the long category which are the links that chain men to death, binds them more firmly, is more difficult to cast off by repentance. None becomes more strong as it is worn longer, none sinks the wretched body and soul more deep in degradation, none is a more probable cause of eternal death. No sin in the long record of man’s crimes has left such a history of shame and sorrow, of degradation and disgrace, of rack and ruin, of death and probable damnation, as the sins of the flesh.

Wars have been waged, nations been wiped from the face of the earth, schisms have arisen and heresies taken their origin in it. Treachery in its most revolting forms, even pestilence and other natural calamities have been the consequences of the indulgence of this passion. Commentators hold, and Holy Writ seems to imply, that it was through the lustful loves of the sons of God with the daughters of men that “all flesh had corrupted its way” in the time of Noah. Wherefore God said: “I will destroy man whom I have created from the face of the earth, from man even to the beasts, from the creeping thing even to the fowls of the air; for it repenteth me that I have made them.” The fearful punishment of the deluge was therefore a mark of God’s resentment against lust. (Gen. 6.)

The lascivious conduct common among the men of Sodom and Gomorrha was the cause of the visitation of God’s wrath in a rain of fire and brimstone, which has left the very sites of those cities undistinguishable even to the searching eye of modern research. (Gen. 19.) The unnatural lust of the men of Gabaa, of the tribe of Benjamin, caused a war in which all the men of that tribe were slain. (Judg. 20). The sons of Juda were struck dead (Gen. 9), Joseph was cast into prison (Gen. 39), Samson was betrayed to his enemies (Judg. 16), Ammon, the son of David, was killed (2 Kings 13), and all in consequence of unbridled lust. David himself became guilty of adultery and murder and brought pestilence upon a whole people, and all through an immodest glance. Solomon departed from the service of God and prepared the way for the division of his people, when he loved strange women. (3 Kings II.)

Profane history teaches the same lesson. The sinful desires of Paris brought about the Trojan war and the destruction of “proud Ilium.” Those of Cleopatra set the Roman world of her day in arms. The mistresses of French kings kept Europe in a deluge of blood for many years. It is a familiar saying that heresy and schism usually end like comedies in a marriage, and it might be added in the marriage of someone, prince or priest, who had no right to marry. Instances in point are well known. Woes incalculable have afflicted the human family either in the natural course of events or as the avenging act of the Almighty upon this vice.

The injury it works to individuals is not less fearfully striking; injury to body and soul, to intellect and will, and worst of all, eternal death. The unclean spirit when, through the habit of this sin, he is permitted to return again and again to the soul, brings with him many other spirits more wicked than himself and, entering in, they dwell there. They take possession, forcible and complete, of the temple of the Holy Ghost which has been given up to them by its unfaithful guardian. The poets have imagined, and ruder ages may perhaps have seen, torture by binding the body of the culprit to a decomposing corpse. No torment could be more horrible. And no figure could be more apt to represent the soul which is chained for life and for eternity to a body consumed with the fires of lust, corrupt with the rottenness of this most degrading of vices.

The body does not escape punishment even in this world. Physicians know, hospitals could testify, our very newspapers bear daily witness to the misery, the desperation of the victims of its horrors. So revolting are the details of this retribution, that while the contemplation of this living death may be salutary even as the meditations of holy Job as he sat upon his dunghill and thought upon death, to speak of them at length would be unbecoming. Let us not, however, neglect to make for ourselves a covenant as holy Job did, not to yield the slightest way to these temptations. The mind also is enchained and the glorious power of thought, by which man is distinguished from the beasts, becomes enfeebled, bestialized. Bound to a body of death it can scarcely be said to reason, but is guided like the beasts by the lowest instincts. It becomes blinded to the teachings of faith. The holy Fathers, accurate observers of all things in the spiritual life of man, unanimously attest that loss of faith is the usual result of this vice.

The intellect becomes incapable of fulfilling any of its duties properly. Its products (witness some modern erotic writers) are more like the wailings of the unclean spirit within them than the coherent utterances of a self-respecting, thinking being. At last it sinks altogether under the weight of its servitude, madness ensues, such madness as might not unreasonably be supposed to be obsession by an impure spirit, and the intellect is, to all intents, dead. The will, too, becomes enfeebled. It loses all relish for what is good. Modesty, purity, justice, charity, hope, faith itself, are crushed out by the python folds of the master of the sinner. The will becomes no longer able to resist temptation. It is allured instead of repelled, as it should be, by all that is corrupt, sinful, and death-dealing. The eyes of the old serpent fascinate it, and in becoming his willing slave it embraces its death. And then comes the parting of soul and body.

When the body is debilitated and the powers of the soul reduced to their lowest, dissolution cannot be far off. And oh, the terrors of the death-bed—if, indeed, he be allowed a bed to die upon–of the victim of lust. Of all the vices, there is none which produces more or greater varieties of despair. From the hard, dull unconsciousness of danger, which seems to court rather than fear the eternal abode with sin, suffering and Satan, to the raving terror of him who knows and dreads his fate, without hope of escaping it. And after death—judgment; and then eternal death, the wages of sin. Death unending, death to God, death to all happiness, death living like the vulture of Prometheus upon the sinner's misery. A dead soul chained to a body of death, confined with all the horrors of entombment with hundreds of other corpses.

O, may He Who rose from the dead deliver us from the body of this death. May Mary Immaculate, and John the Pure, may all the holy choir of virgins, and that bright band who follow the Lamb wheresoever He goeth, intercede for us and keep us from this death. May they obtain for us from the Most Pure the strength to resist temptation; to suffer, as the holy martyrs Agatha, Agnes, and Lucy suffered, rather than yield to the tempter; to resist by violence, even to blood, as many holy monks and hermits resisted, rather than yield even in thought. May Magdalen, Augustine, and all the holy penitents who have felt the sting of the flesh, and, having yielded, gained grace to rise against their tyrant, and casting off their bonds, found safety in the wounds of Christ, obtain of Him for those who have unhappily fallen into this slavery the rending of the chains of the captive, and restoration from that service whose wage is death to the liberty of the children of God.

~~The American Ecclesiastical Review, Vol. 30(3), 1904.

Truth and the Saints

Truth and the Saints

Question. I have often been struck in reading the lives of certain saints who accomplished great works, and thus seemed to give proof of their charity and forethought, yet who spoke of themselves as being more vicious and foolish than the people around them.

 

How are such statements compatible with truth, and if not true, how can they be pleasing to God, or be placed before us as something edifying? I wish you would give some practical answer to this question which a doubting friend put to me when I read him a passage from the life of St. Catharine, of Siena, who, whilst she could advise the Pope in affairs of great moment, deemed herself a worthless body.

Response. It is the law of proportions that as we rise to a higher level our circle of vision grows wider, whilst the relative estimate of our own size and power diminishes. Thus the greater a man's knowledge, the greater becomes his sense of limitations in the vast regions of still unexplored science. His view reaches farther for others, but he feels less secure in himself. In like manner it happens that the nearer the exercise of virtue brings a person to God, the more the immeasurable distance of God's perfection becomes clear to his mind.

 

Hence a good man may see good in all around him, yet having by reflection measured his own distance from the point toward which he strives, he realizes his own immense distance from absolute perfection. He sees less of the imperfections of others, the more he is occupied with his own improvement, which, involving concentration and closer introspection, makes him conscious of all the flaws in his own nature. Thus the apparent untruth is simply a disproportion of judgments, owing to different points of view between the man who sees the world around him from above, and the man who sees it close by. The seeming untruth becomes thus the sincerest truthfulness.

As an example of this I am tempted to cite a passage from a popular novel writer, because it shows that this judgment is ratified, even by the world, when it is honest. Dickens, in one of his novels, draws a character, Tom Pinch, who is a very simple, yet quite a gifted fellow, and with a good heart and a good opinion of every person whom he comes in contact with. Martin Chuzzlewit, whom he has met in his master's house, is suddenly cast upon the world a poor student without a penny. Martin is a shrewd lad, selfish, and sure to make his way; but Tom Pinch pities him, and following him on the road thrusts a book into his hand, to the leaves of which he has pinned a half sovereign wrapped in a piece of paper on which are scrawled in pencil the words: “I don't want it, indeed. I should not know what to do with it if I had it.”

 

Upon these words, which could hardly have been true, and yet were not a lie, Dickens remarks: “There are some falsehoods, Tom, on which men mount, as on bright wings, toward Heaven. There are some truths, cold, bitter, taunting truths, wherein your worldly scholars are very apt and punctual, which bind men down to earth with leaden chains. Who would not rather have to fan him in his dying hour, the lightest feather of a falsehood such as thine, than all the quills that have been plucked from the sharp porcupine, reproachful truth, since time began!” (Martin Chuzzlewit, chap, xiii.).

What is here called falsehood is in truth but the result of that personal view of self which finds itself small in the presence of another's need. Others may not share that view because they do not see the two-fold term of the comparison in the same way; they are on a lower level, and nearer to the earthly, which seems to them accordingly greater than it is when compared with the divine. Like the eye fixed close to the wall, it may see more of the stone, but it sees less of the wall.

 

~THE AMERICAN ECCLESIASTICAL REVIEW, VOLUME 16, 1897.