Fifth Saturday in Lent.
THE EFFECTS OF SIN.
(Continued.)
We will now further consider the effects of Sin, and these the particular effects.
We live three lives; as we are made up of Body, Mind, and Soul, each has its special life. The Body lives an animal life, the Mind an intelligent life, and the Soul a spiritual life.
Sin produces a disturbing and poisoning effect on all these lives.
1.The life of the Body.God made man healthy, vigorous, and immortal. The introduction of Sin into the world has produced disease, infirmity, and death.
Sin is the cause of hard and exhausting toil, of the many hardships, privations, troubles to which we are exposed in this life, and it is the cause of the separation of soul and body in death, and of the corruption that ensues in the grave.
Sin has a certain deteriorating effect on the body when indulged in, at all events those sins which are sins of the flesh, such as drunkenness, gluttony, sensuality. They bring their condemnation with them on the body that sins.
2.The life of the Mind.The true illumination of the mindis God. An intellectual life is willed by God. No man may lawfully neglect to cultivate his understanding by neglecting to acquire knowledge, or his reason, by neglecting to use his rational power. If man does, he sins, he is wasting a precious gift of God, and the light that is in him is darkened, he becomes a prey to superstition, ignorance, stupidity. The life of his mind becomes stunted and extinguished. Sin acts on the mind as well as on the body, it distorts its perception of the truth, narrows its view, and leads it to mistake falsehood for truth.
3.The life of the Soul.This is the most important life of all, and it is the life usually least regarded. This is the life that is divine in us, the breath of God. It has a double aspect (a) as to God, and (b) as to man. That is to say, it lives in two relations, one to God, the other to man.
This spiritual life is the life of the spiritual faculty in man which enables him to see God, to delight in His presence, to love and to fear Him, to find pleasure in prayer and in meditation on the things that are invisible. It enables him to look beyond time into eternity, and to desire those things that God has promised.
Sin, when it has touched the soul, weakens its faculties. Its power of vision is affected. “Blessed are the pure in heart,” said our Lord, “for they shall see God,” but impurity is like a film over the eye, clouding its vision. As the soul ceases to see God, it ceases also to love Him, it takes less delight in prayer; the body, or the mind, gains advantages over it, the compound life is no longer maintained in due balance, but one factor or other overlaps, and chokes the spiritual life.
Again, the spiritual life is the life of the spiritual faculty inman which enables him to observe God’s law, and Sin lames and weakens man’s moral powers. As long as the spiritual life is healthy, man’s moral life is also healthy, for indeed the moral life is only another aspect of the same divine life in man. But if man delivers himself up to Sin, then this moral power in him is weakened, it ceases to speak distinctly, it becomes confused, and finally ceases to speak altogether.
It is possible by continuance in sin to extinguish the spiritual life altogether. If the mind be not employed, then it sinks into inertness and death of the rational and intellectual faculties, and unless the soul be allowed to grow and expand, it also will languish. And if by continuance in Sin the soul be subjected to wound after wound, and its voice be never listened to, then finally it will die.
Simple Maltese Cross