Chapter III. The World
Linquenda tell us, et domus, et placens Uxor: neque harum, quas colis, arborum Te, prseter invisas cupresso?,
Ulla brcvem doniinum sequetur.
Horace.
The question of worldliness is a very difficult one, and one which we would gladly have avoided, had it been in our power to do so. But it is in too many ways connected with our subject, to allow of its being passed over in silence. In the first place, a thoughtful objector will naturally say, If the relation between the Creator and the creature is such as has been laid down in the first eight chapters, and furthermore if it is as manifest and undeniable as it is urged to be, how comes it to pass that it is not more universally, or at least more readily, admitted than it is? Almost all the phenomena of the world betray a totally opposite conviction, and reveal to us an almost unanimous belief in men, that they are on quite a different footing with God from that one, which is here proclaimed to be the only true and tenable one. There must at least be some attempt to explain this discrepancy between what we see and what we are taught. The explanation, we reply, is to be found in what Christians call worldliness. It is this which stands in the way of God's honor, this which defrauds Him of the tribute due to Ilim from His creatures, this which even blinds their eyes to His undeniable rights and prerogatives. How God's own world comes to stand between Himself and 23 2e2 the rational soul, how friendship with it is enmity with Him, — indeed an account of the whole matter must be gone into, in order to show, first, that the influence of the world does account for the non-reception of right views about God, and, secondly, that the world is in no condition to be called as a witness, because of the essential falsehood of its character. This identical falsehood about God is its very life, energy, significance, and condemnation. The right view of God is not unreal, because the world ignores it. On the contrary, it is because it is real that the unreal world ignores it, and the world's ignoring it is, so far forth, an argument in favor of the view.
But not only does this question of worldlincss present itself to us in connection with the whole teaching of the first eight chapters; it is implicated in the two objections which have already been considered, namely, the difficulty of salvation and the fewness of the saved. If it is easy to be saved, whence the grave semblance of its difficulty? If the majority of adult catholics are actually saved, because salvation is easy, why is it necessary to draw so largely on the unknown regions of the death-bed, in order to make up our majority? Why should not salvation be almost universal, if the pardon of sin is so easy, grace so abundant, and all that is wanted is a real earnestness about the interests of our souls? If you acknowledge, as you do, that the look of men's lives, even of the lives of believers, is not as if they were going to be saved, and that they are going to be saved in reality in spite of appearances, what is the explanation of these appearances, when the whole process is so plain and easy? To all this the answer is, that sin is a partial explanation, and the devil is a partial explanation, but that the grand secret lies in worldliness. That is the chief disturbing force, the prime counteracting power. It is this mainly, which keeps down the number of the saved; it is this which makes the matter teem so difficult which is intrinsically so easy; nay, it is this which is a real difficulty, though not such an overwhelming on© as to make salvation positively difficult as a whole. Plainly then the phenomenon of worldliness must be considered here, else it will seem as if an evident objection, and truly the weightiest of all objections, had not been taken into account, and thus an air of insecurity will be thrown, not only over the answer to the two preceding objections, but also over the whole argument of the first eight chapters.
This inquiry into worldliness will, in the third place, truthfully and naturally prepare us for the great conclusion of the whole inquiry, namely, the personal love of God is the only legitimate development of our position as creatures, and at the same time the means by which salvation is rendered easy, and the multitude of the saved augmented. For it will be found that the dangers of worldliness are at once so great and so peculiar, that nothing but a personal love of our Creator will rescue us from them, enable us to break with the world, and to enter into the actual possession of the liberty of the sons of God.
0, it is a radiant land, — this wide, outspread, many-colored mercy of our Creator! But we must be content for a while now to pass out of its kindling sunshine into another land of most ungenial darkness, in the hope that we shall come back heavy laden with booty for God's glory, and knowing how to prize the sunshine more than ever. There is a hell already upon earth; there is something which is excommunicated from God's smile. It is not altogether matter, nor yet altogether spirit. It is not man only, nor Satan only, nor is it exactly sin. It is an infection, an inspiration, an atmosphere, a life, a coloring matter, a pageantry, a fashion, a taste, a witchery, an impersonal but a very recognisable sj-stem. None of these names suit it, and all of them suit it. Scripture calls it, " The World." God's mercy does not enter into it. All hope of its reconciliation with Him is absolutely and eternally precluded. Repentance is incompatible with its existence. The sovereignty of God has laid the ban of the empire upon it; and a holy horror ought to seize us when we think of it. Meanwhile its power over the human creation is terrific, its presence ubiquitous, its deeeitfulnes* incredible. It can find a home under every heart beneath the poles, and it embraces with impartial affection both happiness and misery. It is wider than the catholic Church, and is masterful, lawless, and intrusive within it. It cannot be damned, because it is not a person, but it will perish in the general conflagration, and so its tyranny be over, and its place know it no more. We are living in it, breathing it, acting under its influences, being cheated by its appearances, and unwarily admitting its principles. Is it not of the last importance to us that we should know something of this huge evil creature, this monstrous sea-bird of evil, which flaps its wings from pole to pole, and frightens the nations into obedience by its discordant cries? But we must not be deceived by this description. The transformations of the spirit of the world are among its most wonderful characteristics. It has its gentle voice, its winning manners, its insinuating address, its aspect of beauty and attraction; and the lighter its foot and the softer its voice, the more dreadful is its approach. It is by the firesides of rich and poor, in happy homes where Jesus is named, in gay hearts which fain would never sin. In the chastest domestic affections it can hide its poison. In the very sunshine of external nature, in the combinations of the beautiful elements, — it is somehow even there. The glory of the wind-swept forest and the virgin frost of the Alpine summits have a taint in them of this spirit of the world. It can be dignified as well. It can call to order sin which is not respectable. It can propound wise maxims of public decency, and inspire wholesome regulations of police. It can open the churches, and light tho candles on the altar, and entone Te Deums to the Majesty on high. It is often prominently, and almost pedantically, on the side of morality. Then, again, it has passed into the beauty of art, into the splendor of dress, into the magnificence of furniture. Or, again, there it is, with high principles on its lips, discussing the religious vocation of some youth, and praising God and sanctity, while it urges discreet delay, and less self-trust, and more considerate submissiveness to those who love him, and have natural rights to his obedience. It can sit on the benches of senates and hide in the pages of good books. And yet all the while it is the same huge evil creature which was described above. Have we not reason to fear?
Let us try to learn more definitely what the world is, the world in the scripture sense. A definition is too short, a description is too vague. God never created it: how then does it come here? There is no land, outside the creation of God, which could have harbored this monster, who now usurps so much of this beautiful planet, on which Jesus was born and died, and from which He and His sinless Mother rose to heaven? It seems to be a sort of spirit which has risen up from a disobedient creation, as if the results, and after-consequences of all the sins that ever were, rested in the atmosphere, and loaded it with some imperceptible but highly powerful miasma. It cannot bo a person, and yet it seems as if it possessed both a mind and a will, which on the whole are very consistent, so as to disclose what might appear to be a very perfect self, consciousness. It is painless in its operations, and unerring too; and just as the sun bids the lily be white and the rose red, and they obey without an effort, standing side by side with the same aspect and in the same soil, so this spirit of the world brings forth colors and shapes and scents in our different actions, without the process being cognisable to ourselves. The power of mesmerism on the reluctant will is a good type of the power of this spirit of the world upon ourselves. It is like grace, only that it is its contradictory.
But it has not always the same power. If the expression may be forgiven, there have been times when the world was less worldly than usual; and this looks as if it were something which the existing generation of men always gave out from themselves, a kind of magnetism of varying strengths and different properties. As Satan is sometimes bound, so it pleases God to bind the world sometimes. Or He thunders, and the atmosphere is cleared for awhile, and the times are healthy, and the Church lifts her head and walks quicker. But, on the whole, its power appears to be increasing with time. In other words, the world is getting more worldly. Civilization develops it immensely, and progress helps it on, and multiplies its capabilities. In the matter of worldliness, a highly civilized time is to a comparatively ruder time what the days of machinery are to those of hand-labor. We are not speaking of sin; that is another idea, and brings in fresh considerations: we are speaking only of worldliness. If the characteristics of modern times go on developing with the extreme velocity and herculean strength which they promise now, we may expect (just what prophecy would lead us to anticipate) that the end of the world and the reign of anti-Christ would be times of the most tyrannical worldliness.
This spirit also has its characteristics of time and place. The worldliness of one century is different from that of another. Now it runs towards ambition in the upper classes and discontent in the lower. Now to money-making, luxury, and lavish expenditure. One while it sets towards grosser sins; another while towards wickedness of a more refined description; and another while it will tolerate nothing but educated sin. It also has periodical epidemics and accessions of madness, though at what intervals, or whether by the operation of any law, must be left to the philosophy of history to decide. Certain it is, that ages have manias, the source of which it is difficult to trace, but under which whole communities, and sometimes nations, exhibit symptoms of diabolical possession. Indeed, on looking back, it would appear that every age, as if an age were an individual and had an individual life, had been subject to some vertigo of its own, by which it may be almost known in history. Very often, the phenomena, such as those of the French Revolution, seem to open out new depths in human nature, or to betoken the presence of some preternatural spiritual influences. Then, again, ages have panics, as if some attribute of God came near to the world, and cast a deep shadow over its spirit, making men's hearts quail for fear.
This spirit is further distinguished by the evidences which it presents of a fixed view and a settled purpose. It is capricious, but, for all that, there is nothing about it casual, accidental, fortuitous. It is well instructed for its end, inflexible in its logic, and making directly, no matter through what opposing medium, to its ultimate results. Indeed, it is obviously informed with the wisdom and subtlety of Satan. It is his greatest capability of carrying on his war against God. Like a parasite disease, it fixes on the weak places in men, pandering both to mind and flesh, but chiefly to the former. It is one of those three powers * to whom such dark pre-eminence is given, the world, the flesh, and the devil; and, among these three, it seems to have a kind of precedence given to it, by the way in which our Lord speaks of it in the Gospel, though the line of its diplomacy has been to have itself less thought of and less dreaded than the other two; and, unhappily for the intc-1 rests of God and the welfare of souls, it has succeeded. It is, then, pre-eminent among the enemies of God. Hence the place which it occupies in Holy Scripture. It is the world which hated Christ, the world which cannot receive the Spirit, the world that loves its own, the world that rejoices because Christ has gone away, the world which He overcame, the world for which He would not pray, the world that by wisdom knew not God, the world whose spirit Christians were not to receive, the world that was not worthy of the saints, the world whose friendship is enmity with God, the world that passeth away with its lusts, the world which they who are born of God overcome, or, as the Apocalypse calls it, the world that goes wandering after the beast. Well then might St. James come to his energetic conclusion, Whosoever therefore will be a friend of this world, becometh an enemy of God.* It is remarkable also that St. John, the chosen friend of the Incarnate Word, and the Evangelist of His Divinity, should be the one of the inspired writers who speaks most often and most emphatically about the world, as if the spirit of Jesus found something especially revolting to it in the spirit of the world.
It is this world which we have to fight against throughout the whole of our Christian course. Our salvation depends upon, our unforgiving enmity against it. It is not so much that it is a sin, as that it is the capability of all sins, the air sin breathes, the light by which it sees to do its work, the hot-bed which propagates and forces it, the instinct which guides it, the power which animates it. For a Christian to look at, it is dishearteningly complete. It is a sort of catholic church of the powers of darkness. It has laws of its own, and tastes and principles of its own, litera-
*S. John vii. 7, also xiv. 17, also xv. 19, also xvi. 20, also xvi. 33, also xvii. 9, also 1 Cor. i. 21, also ii. 12, also Ileb. xi. 38, also S. James iv. 4, also 1 John ii. 17, also r. 4, also kfOC xiii. 3
TIIE WORLD. 8G1 ture of its own, a missionary spirit, a compact system, and it is a consistent whole. It is a counterfeit of the Church of God, and in the most implacable antagonism to it. The doctrines of the faith, the practices and devotions of pious persons, the system of the interior life, the mystical and contemplative world of the Saints, with all these it is at deadly war. And so it must be. The view which the Church takes of the world is distinct and clear, and far from flattering to its pride. It considers the friendship of the world aa enmity with God. It puts all the world's affairs under its feet, either as of no consequence, or at least of very secondary importance. It has great faults to find with the effeminacy of the literary character, with the churlishness of the mercantile character, with the servility of the political character, and even with the inordinateness of the domestic character. It provokes the world by looking on progress doubtingly, and with what appears a very inadequate interest, and there is a quiet faith in its contempt for the world extremely irritating to this latter power.
The world on the contrary thinks that it is going to last for ever. It almost assumes that there are no other interests but its own, or that if there are, they are either of no consequence, or troublesome and in the way. It thinks that there is nothing like itself anywhere, that religion was made for its convenience, merely to satisfy a want, and must not forget itself, or if it claims more, must be put down as a rebel, or chased away as a grumbling beggar; and finally it is of opinion, that of all contemptible things spirituality is the most contemptible, cowardly, and little. Thus the Church and the world are incompatible, and must remain so to the end.
We cannot have a better instance of the uncongeniality of the world with the spirit of the Gospel, than their difference in the estimate of prosperity. All those mysterious woes which our Lord denounced against wealth, have their explanation in the dangers of woldliness. It is the peculiai aptitude of wealth, and pomp, and power, to harbor the unholy spirit of the world, to combine with it, and transform themselves into it, which called forth the thrilling malediction of our Lord. Prosperity may be a blessing from God, but it may easily become the triumph of the world. And for the most part the absence of chastisement is anything but a token of God's love. When posterity is a blessing, it is generally a condescension to our weakness. Those are fearful words, Thou hast already received thy reward; yet how many prosperous men there are, the rest of whose lives will keep reminding us of them; the tendency of prosperity in itself is to wean the heart from God, and fix it on creatures. It gives us a most unsupernatural habit of esteeming others according to their success. As it increases, so anxiety to keep it increases also, and makes men restless, selfish, and irreligious; and at length it superinduces a kind of effeminacy of character, which unfits them for the higher and more heroic virtues of the Christian character. This is but a sample of the different way in which the Church and the world reason.
Now it is this world which, far more than the devil, far more than the flesh, yet in union with both, makes the difficulty we find in obeying God's commandments, or following His counsels. It is this which makes earth such a place of struggle and of exile. Proud, exclusive, anxious, hurried, fond of comforts, coveting popularity, with an offensive ostentation of prudence, it is this worldliness which hardens the hearts of men, stops their ears, blinds their eyes, vitiates their taste, and ties their hands, so far as the things of God are concerned. Let it be true that salvation is easy, and that by far the greater number of catholics are saved, it is still unhappily true that the relations of the Creator and the creature, as put forward in this treatise, are not so universally or so practically acknowledged as they ought to be.
Why is this? Sin is a partial answer. The devil is another partial answer. But I believe worldliness has got to answer for a great deal of sin, and for a great deal of devil, besides a whole deluge of iniquity of its own, which is perpetually debasing good works, hindering perfection, preparing materials for sin, assisting the devil in his assaults, and working with execrable assiduity against the sacraments and grace. The world is for ever lowering the heavenly life of the Church. If there ever was an age in which this was true, it is the present. One of the most frightening features of our condition is, that we are so little frightened of the world. The world itself has brought this about. Even spiritual books are chiefly occupied with the devil and the flesh; and certain of the capital sins, such as envy and sloth, no longer hold the prominent places which they held in the systems of the elder ascetics; and yet they are just those vices which contain most of the ungodly spirit of the world. The very essence of worldliness seems to consist in its making us forget that we are creatures; and the more this view is reflected upon, the more correct will it appear.
When our Blessed Lord describes the days before the Flood, and again those which shall precede the end of the world, He portrays them rather as times of worldliness than of open sin. Men were eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage: and He says no more. Now none of these things are wrong in themselves. "We can eat and drink, as the apostle teaches us, to the glory of God, and marriage was a divine institution at the time of the Flood, and is now a Christian Saerame-nt. In the same way when He describes the life of the only person whom the gospel narrative follows into the abode of the lost, He sums it up as the being clothed in purple and fine linen, and feasting sumptuously every day. Here again there is nothing directly sinful in the actions which He names. It surely
3GI THE WORLD.
cannot bo a mortal sin to have fine linen, nor will a man loso a state of grace because he feasts sumptuously every day, provided that no other sins follow in the train of this soft life. The malice of it all is in its worldliness, in the fact that this was all or nearly all the lives of those before the flood, of those before the days of anti-Christ, and of the unhappy Dives. Life began and ended in worldliness. There was nothing for God. It was comprised in the pleasures of the world, it rested in them, it was satisfied by them. Its characteristic was sins of omission. Worldliness might almost be defined to be a state of habitual sins of omission. The devil urges men on to great positivo breaches of the divine commandments. The passions of the flesh impel sinners to give way to their passions by such dreadful sins, as catch the eyes of men and startle them by their iniquity. Worldliness only leads to these things occasionally and by accident. It neither scandalizes others, nor frightens the sinner himself. This is the very feature of it, which, rightly considered, ought to be so terrifying* The reaction of a great sin, or the shame which follows it, are often the pioneers of grace. They give self-love such a serious shock, that under the influence of it men return to God. Worldliness hides from the soul its real malice, and thus keeps at arm's length from it some of the most persuasive motives to repentance. Thus the Pharisees are depicted in the Gospel as being eminently worldly. It is worldliness, not immorality, which is put before us. There is even much of moral decency, much of respectable ob- I scrvance, much religious profession; and yet when oui Blessed Saviour went among them, they were further from grace than the publicans and sinners. They had implicit hatred of God in their hearts already, which became explicit as soon as they saw Him. The Magdalen, the Samaritan, the woman taken in adultery, — it was these who gathered round Jesus, attracted by His sweetness, and touched by the grace which went out from Him. Tho Pharisees only grew more cold, more haughty, more self-opinionated, until they ended by the greatest of all sins, the crucifixion of our Lord. For worldliness, when its selfish necessities drive it at last into open sin, for the most part sins more awfully and more im penitently than even the unbridled passions of our nature. So again there was the young man who had great possessions, and who loved Jesus when he saw Him, and wished to follow Him. He was a religious man, and with humble scrupulosity observed the commandments of God; but when our Lord told him to sell and give the price to the poor and to follow Him, he turned away sorrowful, and was found unequal to such a blessed vocation. Now his refusing to sell his property was surely not a mortal sin. It does not appear that our Lord considered him to have sinned by his refusal. It was the operation of worldliness. We do not know what the young man's future was; but a sad cloud of misgivings must hang over the memory of him whom Jesus invited to follow Him, and who turned away. Is he looking now in heaven upon that Face, from whose mild beauty he so sadly turned away on earth?
Thus the outward aspect of worldliness is not sin. Its character is negative. It abounds in omissions. Yet throughout the Gospels our Saviour seems purposely to point to it rather than to open sin. When the young man turned away, His remark was, How hard it is for those who have riches to enter into the kingdom of heaven. But the very fact of our Lord's thus branding worldliness with His especial reprobation is enough to show that it is in reality deeply sinful, hatefully sinful. It is a life without God in the world. It is a continual ignoring of God, a continual quiet contempt of His rights, an insolent abatement in the service which He claims from His creatures. Self is set up instead of God. The canons of human re- 2f2 spect are more looked up to than the Divine Command ments. God is very little adverted to. He is passed over. The very thought of Him soon ceases to make the worldly man uncomfortable. Indeed all his chief objections to religion, if he thought much about the matter, would bo found a repose on his apprehension of it as restless and uncomfortable. But all this surely must represent an immensity of interior mortal sin. Can a man habitually forget God, and be in a state of habitual grace? Can he habitually prefer purple garments and sumptuous fare to the service of his Creator, and be free of mortal sin? Can he make up a life for himself even of the world's sinless enjoyments, such as eating, drinking, and marrying, and will not the mere omission of God from it be enough to constitute him in a state of deadly sin? At that rate a moral atheist is more acceptable to God than a poor sinner honestly but feebly fighting with some habit of vice, to which his nature and his past offences set so strongly, that he can hardly lift himself up. At that rate the Pharisees in the Gospel would be the patterns for our imitation, rather than the publicans and sinners; or at least they would be as safe. Or shall we say that faith is enough to save us without charity? If a man only believes rightly, let him eat and drink and be gaily clothed, and let him care for nothing else, and at least that exclusive love of creatures, that omission of the Creator, provided only it issues in no other outward nets than his fine dinners and his expensive clothes, shall never keep his soul from heaven. His purple and his sumptuous feasting shall be his beatific vision here, and then his outward morality shall by God's mercy hand him on to his second beatific Vision, the Vision of the beauty of God, and the eternal ravishment of the Most Holy and Undivided Trinity! Can this be true? Yet on the other hand, we may not make into sins what
God has not made sins. How is this? 0 it is the awful world of inward sin which is the horror of all this worldliness! It is possession, worse far than diabolical possession, because at once more hideous and more complete. It is the interior irreligiousness, the cold pride, the hardened heart, the depraved sense, the real unbelief, the more than implicit hatred of God, which makes the soul of the worldly man an actual, moral, and intellectual hell on earth, hidden by an outward show of faultless proprieties, which only make it more revolting to the Eye that penetrates the insulting disguise. The secret sins moreover of the worldly are a very sea of iniquity. Their name is legion; they cannot be counted. Almost every thought is sin, because of the inordinate worship of self that is in it. Almost every step is sin, because it is treading underfoot some ordinance of God. It is a life without prayer, a life without desire of heaven, a life without fear of hell, a life without love of God, a life without any supernatural habits at all. Is not hell the most natural transition from such a life as this? Heaven is not a sensual paradise. God is the joy, and the beauty, and the contentment there: all is for God, all from God, all to God, all in God, all round God as the beautiful central fire about which His happy creatures cluster in amazement and delight. Whereas in worldliness God is the discomfort of the whole thing, an intrusion, an unseasonable thought, an inharmonious presence like a disagreeable uninvited guest, irritating and fatiguing us by the simple demand His presence makes on our sufferance and our courtesy. 0 surely such a man has sin in his veins instead of blood!
Worldliness then is a life of secret sins. It is such an irresistible tendency to sin, such a successful encouragement of it, such a genial climate, such a collection of favourable circumstances, such an amazing capability of sin, that it breeds actual sins, regularly formed and with all the theological requirements, by millions and millions. If we read what the catechism of the Council of Trent says of sins of thought, we shall sec how marvellously prolific sins can be, and what a pre-eminently devastating power sins of thought in particular exercise within the soul. In numberless cases open and crying sins must come at last. Still we must remember that on the whole there are two characteristics which always distinguish sins of worldliness from sins of the passions, or sins of direct diabolical temptation. The respectability which worldliness affects leads it rather to satisfy itself in secret sins. Indeed its worship of self, its predilection for an easy life, would hinder its embarking in sins which take trouble, time, and forethought, or which run risks of disagreeable consequences, and therefore would keep it confined within a sphere of secret sins. And in the next place its love of comfort makes it so habitually disinclined to listen to the reproaches of conscience, or the teasing solicitations of grace, that it passes into the state of a seared conscience, a deadened moral sense, with a speed which is unknown even to cruelty or sensuality.
A seared conscience! * This is a fearful possibility, and yet to use the apostle's expression, " the Spirit manifestly saith" that there is such a thing. It is according to St. Paul one of the marks of heresy. It belongs also peculiarly to worldliness. To have gone on for such a length of time doing wrong that we have at last ceased to advert to its being wrong, to sin and for the monitor within to be silent, to forget God and not to remember that we are forgetting Him, — all this is surely far worse than to be a savage or' an idolater. But this is to have a seared conscience. This is the tendency of worldliness, a tendency which it can develop with incomparable swiftness. And then where is the power of coming right again? We have drifted away from
THE WORLD. SG9 all the sweet facilities of repentance. We have hardened ourselves against the ordinary impetus of grace. We have made ourselves so unlovely that grace would shun us if it could. We have sold ourselves to the devil, and he has got us safe before the proper time. With most men it is enough to say that if they erred, at least they had a good conscience about it, or that their conscience told them it was wrong, and they are sorry they gave way. But if we have a seared conscience, neither of these things avail. We have forgotten and pretermitted God: we did so contumeliously at first; but now our habitual contempt has superinduced oblivion: it seems as if He were going to retaliate, to pay us back in our own coin, and for the present at least to pretermit us. We no longer know when we are in danger. We have lost our chart. We can tell nothing of our latitude and longitude. No land is in sight: nothing but a waste of boundless waters. The sun is hidden, and we can take no observations. The night is so grim and murky, that not a star will give us an indistinct notion where we are; and the needle is snapped, and we know neither north nor south, nor east nor west. What are our chances of safety now? There has come upon us the fatal woe of Isaias,2 Woe to you that call evil good, and good evil, that put darkness for light, and light for darkness, that put bitter for sweet, and sweet for bitter. There is nothing to compare with worldliness for vitiating the moral taste. There are some possibilities on earth which we cannot bear to think of without shuddering. It is generally God's merciful ordinance that we should not know them in the individual cases, even when we see them. One of these is the possibility of a man's going hopelessly out of his mind, when he is in a state of mortal sin. If he is to have no intermission of his madness, no lucid interval before his death, if he was actually in mortal sin when the last step of his aberration3 was completed, and reason had abdicated her throne entirely, then he is as it were damned already. He walks about the earth a living part of hell. His fate is sealed while the sun still shines upon his head, and the flowers grow beneath his feet, and the birds sing as he passes. He smiles, but he is lost. He sings, but he is the hopeless property of God's great enemy. Kindness touches his heart, but grace has ebbed from it for ever. He belongs to the dismal centre of the earth; it is only by accident that he is walking on its radiant surface. This is one of earth's fearful possibilities. And the seared conscience of worldliness is a desperately near approach to this. Faith is still there, and reason also, and a miracle of grace can rouse them both. But are worldly people the likely subjects of God's miracles? Ah! the sweet miracle of conversion haunts the company of publicans and sinners, not the undoubting self-sufficiency of this world's pharisees! 0 poor worldling, maliciously and guiltily unsuspecting now of thy real state, that man who went mad in mortal sin is thy shadow, thy brother, and thy type!
Now every one of these phenomena of worldliness may be resolved into a forgetfulness that we are creatures. There is no look about the life of Dives that he remembered ho was a creature. There might be, mingled with his characteristic good nature which made him love his brothers so much and give alms to Lazarus, some confused notions of duty to a Creator; but any abiding sense of his being a creature there was none. He solved the problem of the possibility of these two forgetfulnesses being separated, that of having a Creator and that of being a creature. It is this forgetfulness which is the fountain of almost all sins of omission. A worldly man never looks like a man who so lives as having to give an account of himself to a higher power. Anything, which should evince a sense of an invisible world, would be incongruous in his ordinary conduct; and if from early associations or natural limorousness of character he should betray any such sense, it •would instantly take the form of superstition rather than that of religion. When the devil tempts a man to a great sin of passion, such as murder, or sensuality at last beguiles a man to relapse into his intemperance, in neither of these cases does he forget that he is a creature. Indeed it is his advertence to the law of his Creator which gives the malice to his sin. But there is no struggle in worldliness. It is a false faith, a false religion. It does not recognise the rights of the Creator, nor occupy itself with the duties of the creature. It begins with self and ends with self, and if compelled to lodge an appeal outside itself, it appeals to the judgments of human respect. Wherever there is worldliness, there is this forgetfulness that we are creatures; and wherever there is this forgetfulness that we are creatures, there also is worldliness.
When a man's sympathies are with a disloyal State rather than with the Holy See, there is worldliness. The world is preferred before the Church. When men object to the doctrine of religious vocation, and without other reasons than a certain instinct, try to hinder their children from entering religious orders, there is worldliness. The one work of the creature, to do the Creator's will, is overlooked or unacknowledged. When men are ashamed of their religion before heretics, especially of its distinctive practices and unpopular doctrines, there is worldliness. The creature forgets himself, and makes himself the standard of truth. Wherever men, who are not to their own sensible cost taking up the cross daily and following Christ, inveigh against religious enthusiasm or the want of moderation in piety, there is worldliness. The creature wants to limit the service of the Creator. When men do not give alms, or give them scantily, or give them in an eccentric and peculiar way, there is worldliness. The creature either claims as his own what he only holds at the good pleasure of his Creator, or he claims to satisfy his own whim and caprice in the way in which he pays it back to his Creator. Indeed, all developments of worldliness exhibit some obliquity in a man's perception of the true relations between the Creator and the creature. Ought we not, then, seriously to ask ourselves, if we have any right to be so little afraid of worldliness as we are? If an evil is universal, if it is almost imperceptible, if it is generally fatal, if we know it to be in the middle of us, and if not suspecting that we have it, is, or may be, one of the worst symptoms of our having it, does not prudence suggest to us almost an excess in caution, almost a nervousness of fear, almost a fanci fulness of apprehension? Is it well that we should be so calm and cool? Is it certain that our calmness and our coolness are not actual proofs of the disease? Worldliness only requires one condition for its success, that we should not fear it. He who fears God must also fear the world, and he who fears the world need never fear that he has lest the fear of God.
It is hard to live in a place and avoid the spirit of it. It is hard to live in the world and avoid worldliness. Yet this is what we have to do. The world we cannot leave till God summons us; but worldliness, which is the spirit of the world, should not be allowed to infect us. As the smell of fire bad not passed upon the garments of the three children in the burning fiery furnace, so must the odor of worldliness not pass upon our souls. But to the avoiding of worldliness, no help is more efficacious than having a right and fixed view of the world. There are two views of the world which Christians may take, two views which are actually taken by those who are striving to serve God and to love Him purely. Which of the two views a man takes, depends partly upon his early associations, partly upon his natural character, and partly upon the circumstances of his vocation; and his spiritual life will be found to be considerably modified by the particular view which he is led to take. Some take a very gloomy view of the world. To them it seems altogether bad, wholly evil, irredeemably lost. Everything is danger; for there is sin everywhere. All its roses have thorns under the leaves. There is a curse upon everything belonging to it. Its joys are only other forms of melancholy. Its sunshine is a mockery: its beautiful scenery a deceit: the soothingness of its domestic affections a snare. Its life is an incessant death. "We have no right to smile at anything. The world is so dark that it is even a perpetual partial eclipse of God. If the present is miserable, let us delay upon it; for in misery we shall find food for our souls. If it is joyous, let us rush from it into the forebodings of a future, when all this world and the fashion of it will be burned up with fire. Let us speak low, lest the devil hear us, and use his knowledge to our destruction. Let us live as ancient monarcha lived, in daily fear of poison in every dish. A funeral on a wet day in a disconsolate churchyard, this is the type of the minds who take this view.
The other view is the very opposite of all this. It is the bright view. Those who take it see all creation lying before them with the lustre of God's benediction on it. It is the earth on which Jesus was born, and where Mary lived. It marvels at the number of exquisite pleasures with which it is strewn, so very few of which comparatively are sins. The innocent attachments of earthly love are to such men helps to love God better. Natural beauty supernaturalizes their minds. The sunshine makes them better men. God's perfections are seen everywhere written in hieroglyphics over the world. Kindness is so abundant, nobility of heart so plentiful, the joys of home so pure yet so attractive, the successes of the Gospel so infinitely consoling, all things, in fact, so much better on trial than they seemed, that the 2c world appears a happy place, and missing but a little, so little it is sad to think how little, of being a holy place also, holy from the very abundance of its pure happiness. At every turn, there are radiant fountains of joy leaping up, to meet us. Each day, like the cystus, has a thousand new blossoms to show: it lays them down when evening comes, and the next morning it has as gay a show of flowers as ever. Even adverse things are wonderfully tempered in the present, while in the past they have such a pathetic golden light upon them, that the memory of them is one of our best treasures, and we would not for worlds not have suffered them; and, as to any evil in the future, there is such an inextinguishable light of joy within us, that we 6imply disbelieve it. The clouds fly before us as we go. Music sounds around our path. And as to cares, they find themselves so little at home with us, that, when we come to the night, "they fold up their tents like the Arabs, and as silently steal away."
St. Bernard may be called the prophet of the first view, St. Francis of Sales of the second. The first seems more safe for human presumption; the second more cheering to discouragement. One leads through holy fear to love; the other through holy love to fear. The one disenchants more from the world; the other enchants us more with God. The one subdues; the other gives elasticity. The one seems more admonitory to man; the other more honorable to God. Both can make saints; but saints of different kinds. Both are true; yet both are untrue. Both are true as far as they go, and both are untrue when they exclude the other. They are partial views; and one is more true to each person than the other, because it is more suitable for his character and temper to dwell upon what is prominently dark, or prominently bright, as the case may be. The great thing is, whichever view we take, to have it clearly before us and keep to it consistently, because of the irresistible influence which these views exercise upon the spiritual life. They make men pray differently, and act differently in their secret relations with God. They foster different graces. They give birth to different vocations. They supply different motives. The subjects for meditation, the subjects for particular examination of conscience, have to do with the dark or bright view men habitually take of the world. The question between an active or a contemplative life is often decided by them. They have each their own class of temptations, and their own rocks on which they may strike and go down. They have each also their own graces, their own beauties, their own attractions, their own blessings, and their own short roads to heaven. The strange thing is, that no one seems to be able to take in impartially the whole view of the world, the true view, the bright and dark together. Intellectually they may do so; but practically they must lean either to the dark or bright, exaggerate their own view, and do the other view injustice. No mind leaves things uncolored. It is our necessity; we cannot help ourselves. The grand thing is to turn it all to God, and to begin straightway to manufacture heavenly love both out of our darkness and our light.
It is dangerous to talk of general rules in such subject matters. But, as upon the whole we find the darker view taken by cloistered saints, and the brighter view by secular saints, it may not be an error to suppose that the brighter view of the world is the best for those who live in the world. The dark view may readily become gloomy, and gloom leads to inaction, to concentration upon self, to the judging of others, to a discontentment with the state of things around us; and the fruit of all this is pride, sourness, want of zeal, and self-righteousness. Men with a frustrated vocation to religion, and living in the world, where they have no right to be, are mostly uncharitable men. Reformers.
good and bad, have for the most part emanated from the cloister. Luther was an Augustinian; Savonarola a Dominican. A monk has beautiful examples of the highest virtue constantly before him, which not only urge him on in his heroic love of God, but also counteract what there might be depressing or unnerving in his melancholy view of the world. To him in his circumstances it is a powerful stimulus to sanctity. But it would require very peculiar circumstances indeed to make it such to persons aiming at perfection in the world. They are good; they love God; they frequent the Sacraments; they make a mental prayer; they practise voluntary mortifications; they live under spiritual direction; their interests and tastes are in spiritual things. Yet for all this they enjoy the world. Many of its blameless pleasures are real pleasures to them. They love many persons, and many persons love them. Their home-circle is bright and tender; and if it does not lead to God, there is no appearance of its leading away from Him. Now what will happen if we force them to believe that all is misery around them, and that they ought to be miserable themselves, and that it is very imperfect of them not to be so? The fact is, they are not miserable, and they cannot see why they should be so: and moreover they actually cannot be miserable, even if they try. Consequently if we persist in forcing upon them a view which does not suit them, and is against the grain, they either become perplexed and scrupulous, seeing sin where there is no sin, and believing the detection of sin to be the highest spiritual discernment, and so farewell to their serving God for love; or they start away from a devout life altogether, in disgust and impatience, as an unreality, which is based upon a false theory, and so worth nothing at all, or as an inflated pedantic imposture, which even those who talk big about it do not themselves believe. Then as a matter of fact the number of things which are sinful is much less than this ticw would lead us to suppose; and a man aiming at perfection in the world is much more exposed than others to occasions of sin. Indeed this is one of his chief difficulties, the difficulty which in all ages has so blessedly filled the cloisters and recruited the congregations of apostolic men. But this very fact makes any exaggeration of the matter extremely dangerous, as both discouraging and unsettling; and every one knows that in the world, where there is neither rule nor vows, discouragement and unsettlement are the two most fatal enemies of the spiritual life. The bright view is doubtless a better basis for perfection in the world. Meanwhile it must guard itself against laxity, and love of pleasure, and an inadequate notion of sin, as much as the darker view must shun discouragement, self-exaltation, and uncharitableness, to which of its own nature it is prone. The dark view must not be querulous with God, nor the bright view make too free with His perfections.
Whatever view we take of the world, we must be upon our guard against its spirit. Of that spirit Christians can have but one view. Inspiration has fixed it for ever; it is the enemy of God. No cloisters can hope to keep it out; for it has the gift of subtlety. There is air enough in one heart for it to live, and thrive amazingly! But much more are those who live in the world exposed to its dangers. It looks so moral, and sometimes, but not often, even generous, in order to deceive us. It can talk most reasonably and well. It can praise religion, and take its side, though there is always an ulterior purpose in view. We see its influence in society. Faith deciphers it for us there. We behold a system of proprieties with no self-denial in them, a number of axioms of doubtful morality gaining ground and passing current, a humility which consists in our ruling ourselves by the opinions of others, an inventiveness of amusements which bewilder our notions of right and wrong; and in all this we can prophesy evil and suspect dangers, while it is 2g2 hard for us to name the evil and to put our finger on the danger. When we look at people outside the Church, we see how insinuatingly worldliness prevents their coming into it. We can see clearly, what the sufferers themselves cannot see at all. We can watch its influence on sinners, how artfully it entices them into deep places, how strongly it holds them down, how cleverly it throws suspicion upon the advances and offers of grace, how variously it contrives delays, and when it fails, how hypocritically it can rejoice in a man's conversion, how successfully it can lay hold of his fresh vigor and high spirits, and how mercilessly it can lead him backwards and blindfold into a relapse! But the sinner sees nothing of this himself. If it were told him, it would sound in his ears as a romance.
We can trace the influence of worldliness upon pious people. Their frequentation of the sacraments, their church-going, their alms-giving, their interest in catholic plans, contrast strangely with their anxiety to get into society, with their hankering after great people, with their excitement about marriages, with the perpetual running of their conversation on connections, wealth, influence, and the like, and their unconscious but almost gross respect for those who are very much richer than themselves, or very much higher than themselves. It would never do for them to sit for a picture of catholic devotion. Yet they do not 6ee all this, and they are really full of God, always talking of Him, always planning for Ilim, always fidgetty about His glory. Sometimes a step further is taken, and we see a most portentous union of piety and worldliness, really as if one person were two persons, one person in church, and another person out of church, one person with priest and religious, and another person with worldly company. These people make the oddest compensations to themselves for their pious self-denials, and again with such grotesque earnestness penance their worldliness in revenge for its
THE WORLD. Oil)
inroad* upon their piety, that they remind us of the stories protestants tell us of the Italian bravos, who, before they commit a murder, most devoutly recommend it to the Madonna. Yet God and the world keep the peace so unbrokenly in their hearts, that they have hardly a suspicion of the incongruous appearance they present to others, still less of the horrible reality of their spiritual condition. Now if we can see all this in others, is it at all likely that we are free from it ourselves? 0 depend upon it, there is no freedom but in excessive fear, no security but in a weary vigilance! It is heavy work always to be keeping guard. But there is no sleep in the enemy's camp, and we are in a war which knows neither peace nor truce. The night is both cold and long, and if divine love keep us not awake, what else is there that will?
It may very naturally be now objected that the conclusion of this chapter tends to destroy the conclusion of the last, that if worldliness accounts for the widely spread denial of those relations of Creator and creature which have been shown to be true, so it will not allow us to suppose that the majority of catholics are saved, when worldliness is at once so universal, and so deadly to the soul. But this by no means follows. What has been said of the obtrueiveness of evil and the hiddenness of good, and of the graces which visit old age, sickness, and death, applies as well to worldliness as to sin. No 1 the conclusion, which might seem to follow from this doctrine of worldliness, would be, that very far from a majority of the rich among catholics would be saved. But the rich are a mere handful compared to the multitudinous poor. So that, even allowing the stern conclusion to be drawn that very few rich persons are saved, even among catholics, the conclusion of the preceding chapter would remain unshaken. Many writers have taken this startling view. Lacordaire, in making up his majority of the saved, lays the chief stress on children, women, and the countless poor.4 Bossuct, commenting on the words of the seventy-first psalm, He shall judge the poor of the people and He shall save the children of the poor, draws a picture similar to that of Lacordaire.f Fromond, in his commentary on the catholic epistles, enters upon the question of the number of the saved when he isexplaining the thirteenth verse of the second chapter of St. James, and one of the arguments which he brings forward in support of the more gloomy view is, that " although perhaps a majority of the faithful do not die without the sacrament of penance, yet very many worldly people (plerique mundani) do not receive the fruit of the sacrament;" and the reason he gives for this opinion is, that their appreciation of riches, honors, pleasures, and other earthly goods is too high and fixed for their sorrow for sin easily to rise to that appreciation of its malignity, which theology requires even in the adequate attrition for absolution. J Palafox also, in his book on Devotion to St. Peter, teaches the same doctrine in his comparison of the prodigal son, and the young man who went away sorrowful. It was his appreciation of riches which hindered his appreciation of God, and it was the prodigal's freedom from this which on the other hand facilitated his conversion^ There is no doubt that our Lord's woes pronounced upon the rich are among the most painful and terrific mys-teries of the Gospel, and should drive rich men into that facile, prompt, various, unasked, abundant, and self-denying almsgiving for the love of God, in which alone their safety consists. But, so far as the present question is concerned, I express no opinion as to whether a very small minority of rich catholics are saved; I do not know enough of the world to form a judgment, and my little experience
X Migne. Cursus Sacne Scripturae, Tom. xxv. col. 682. g Palafox. Excellencias de San Pedro, lib. iii. cap. 9.
of the rich would go the other way: I only say that even if this melancholy belief be true, it by no means destroys the previous conclusion that the numerical majority of catholics are saved.
But to conclude, there are certain things which it is important to note with regard to worldliness, and which cannot be too often repeated. The first is, that even spiritual persons for the most part greatly under-estimate its danger. They have not a sufficiently intelligent belief in its universality, in its subtlety, in its power of combining with good in the most imperceptible quantities, and then spoiling it, or in its peculiar aptness for fixing itself just upon the very persons who consider themselves decidedly free from it. Spiritual discernment is a rare gift, and one which belongs only to those whose hearts are all for God. It is the great art of the world to persuade men that it is not so dangerous as it is described, and that with monks it is a sort of pious fashion to abuse the world, while with preachers it is simply an affair of rhetoric. This persuasion is its triumph. Nothing more is needed. When you have under-estimated its danger, you are already its victim.
In the second place, as men are very apt not to know worldliness even when they see it, and as it is not an easy matter always to be paying attention to the atmosphere we breathe, it is of great importance to have well-ascertained principles. It is astonishing how few men are in possession of such. An almost incredibfe amount of excellent effort comes to nothing great, because it is at random, and by fits and starts, and operating inconsistently with its antecedents. The really powerful man in the world is the consistent man, the man of ascertained principles and of adjusted views. The world, like a suspicious potentate, is always proposing concordats. We are asked first for one compromise, then for another. We do not know when we have passed the line which involved a principle, and so wo discover, that we have committed ourselves to something, in which it is impossible for us to keep our word without surrendering our independence altogether. Now with ascertained principles we have settled all this at the outset. Even when we get beyond the extent of our knowledge, or the sphere of our experience, we know what to suspect and where to be upon our guard. Our instincts are right, and what is practically of greater importance, they are consistent also. Thus we do not fall into the world's power, and are never taken unawares, and have not to give offence by having to retrace our steps. Thus when we change our state of life, or enter upon a new department of duty, or come to a crisis in life, our relations with the world are more or less altered; and if we have then to hesitate and linger, settling our future mode of operations and mapping out the country before us, because we have no ascertained principles, every step we take, (and we cannot stand still, this is not a world for that work,) we are putting on record some precedent against ourselves. An inconsistent great man is an impotent creature in practical matters, while a consistent moderate man does the work of a great one. Above all a man should have ascertained principles of practical religion, if religion is to be the business of his life. It is deplorable for the cause of God on earth, that such men are so few.
In the third place, if ascertained principles are of such importance to us in this respect, and if the power of our faith depends materially either on its simplicity or its intelligence, and if our faith is " the victory which overcometh the world," it is of great consequence that we should know and study our religion well. In these days there is an immense amount of information, floating in society, regarding trie controversies of the Church and the world. They are now daily coming more into collision, in questions of politics, in systems of beneficence, in the statistics of crime, in the doctrines of progress, in the discoveries of science, in the quarrels of the metaphysical schools, and in tho new shapes of old controversies between the Church and the dissident sects around her. The world has a power and a purchase in the anti-church side of all these questions; and it is so tempting to be moderate, so pleasant to yield, so hard to prove, so weary to argue, so unnatural to confess our own ignorance, that an educated modern catholic who does not study the doctrines of his religion, as carefully as the subject-matter of his profession, will hardly escape betraying God sometimes, and getting on the wrong side without intending it. Even a study of theology, at least to some extent, is of considerable utility, in this particular light, as a safeguard against worldlincss. It is proverbial that a little knowledge is a dangerous thing; but this is less true of theology than it is of any other science, because the least acquaintance with it deepens our view of our own ignorance, and it breathes such an odor of God that intellectual bashfulness would seem to be its special gift, increasing as our studies penetrate nearer and nearer to those divine abysses, into which knowledge may not descend until it has been metamorphosed into love. A man, who has finished his education in these days without having acquired a profound intellectual respect for his religion, is the most likely of all men to become the prey of an unbelieving and ungodly world, and to betray his Lord without intending it, and then to grow angry, and turn away in proud dislike from Him whom he has thus betrayed.
In the last place, it is honestly to be confessed, that all these things do but form an armor against the spirit of the world. They are not a victory over it. Moreover it is an armor which is by no means invulnerable. The weight of the arms and the weariness of the fight have laid many a warrior low, from whom no blood had flowed, but whose very bones the heavy fall had cruelly broken. Many a ruK WORI.H
. that could not penetrate tho cunning joints of th^ suit of mail, has unseated tho rider, and loft him lifeless beneath 1 r's foot, Si> all these helps, which have boon here suggested, aro not infallible j nay. they Ml but
.>on; and for all their worth, the world and most likely will, take us captive in tho end. There is no redemption for the creature but in tho sor\ioo of the Creator. There is no power to counteract the manifold spirit of evil but one, and that is the desire of l»od, the c to see His Face, the yearning for His beauty. There ^ M tMOlfto Against world! iuom but God.
evn vw% chw>.
Footnotes
Chapter 12 of 13