Fifth Thursday in Lent.
THE GRAVITY OF SIN.
(Continued.)
1. We have spoken of Sin as a revolt against God, as undoing the work of Jesus Christ, and neutralising the Holy Ghost’s work of Sanctification. We will now consider it asan attack on Society.
God is the Author of peace and concord, “He maketh men to be of one mind in an house.” It is due to Him that Society is possible. He made man not only to be an individual with freedom, but to be a member of a community. The most elementary type of community is the Family, then comes the State, and lastly, the Church. Such unions can only be formed and maintained by a certain amount of sacrifice of individual freedom, and by mutual forbearance and compromise. Now as we see that barbarism, pure and simple, is the state of man who lives merely as an individual, and as we may be quite sure that God never intended man to be a savage, we may conclude, from reason, that God wills that man should unite with his fellow-men into societies, and therefore that He sanctions and blesses the surrenders and compromises that make such unions possible. It is so in a family; no single member cando exactly what he likes, he must give up something for the others, and it is exactly the same in the State and in the Church. In human nature there is an union of different elements, and in man as created all these were in complete accord; since the Fall disorder has entered into their relations, so that there is divergence of object aimed at by mind, body, and soul. God desires to see man’s nature restored to perfect unity, so that all conflicting tendencies may cease.
2. Now Sin attacks Society—i.e., the Divinely-ordered unity—in several ways.
(a) ByPrideit impels the individual to assume a place to which he has no right, or to refuse to the rest those concessions which are necessary to make social harmony possible. Man rebels against being only one among many, and endeavours to thrust himself into prominence by arrogating to himself what does not lawfully belong to him.
(b) ByJealousymen are excited the one against the other. They envy each other the place, the wealth, the respect, that they have obtained. All men cannot have the same position, the same wealth, and the same respect; there must be difference among the members of the community, as there are differences among the members of the body. Sin is an attack on Society when, through envy, it stirs up class jealousies, and stimulates hostility between different members of the social body.
(c) ByCupidity. Men, in their selfish greed to arrogate to themselves all things desirable, use the strength, opportunities, position they have, to draw to themselves the good things of this world, to the despoiling of their fellows. Our Lord warns against love ofMammon. No man, He said, could serve God and Mammon, that is, riches; and one reason is, that this greed after wealth is not for the distributing of means of subsistence among the many, and the relief of the necessitous, but in order that it all may be retained for the glorification and indulgence of self.
3. These three motives for the breaking-up of Society are all of Diabolic inspiration. As God is the author of unity, so is Satan the source of all schism. God brings men together, and inspires to the sacrifice of their individual caprices to the general good; the Evil One, on the other hand, urges to the undue exaltation of the individual self, so as to procure separation. He is the cause of discord in families, of the sapping of the principles of unity in the State, and to heresies and schisms that rend the Church. In a family, in the State, in the Church, all members, all classes, all orders, are bound together for the common good, and the Divine Spirit is in every social body as a good ferment—working out of it what is evil. But the Spirit of Evil is the spirit of decomposition, which breaks up all unity. It is in the family, in the State, in the Church, what death is to that unity, the living man—a break-up into warring units.
Simple Maltese Cross