The Life of The Soul

by

JAMES M. GILLIS, C. S. P.





THE LIFE OF THE SOUL

by

Rev. James M. Gillis, C. S. P.,

Editor of The Catholic World.

Nine addresses delivered in the Catholic Hour, produced by

the National Council of Catholic Men through the

courtesy of the National Broadcasting Company

and its associated stations.

(On Sundays from November 1 to December 27, 1936)

November 1 Religion — 5

November 8 Prayer 15

November 15 Mysticism 23

November 22 Self-Discipline 33

November 29 Temptation 41

December 6 Sin 49

December 13 The Presence of God 58

December 20 The Destiny of the Soul 68

December 27 Christmas 78

National Council of Catholic Men

Producer of the Catholic Hour

1312 Massachusetts Avenue

Washington, D. C.

Printed and distributed by Our Sunday Visitor

Huntington, Indiana



IMPRIMATUR:

Hh JOHN FRANCIS NOLL, D. D.,

Bishop of Fort Wayne.



DEDICATED

TO THE MEMORY OF MY DEAR FRIEND AND
BROTHER IN RELIGION MONSIGNOR JOHN J.
BURKE OF THE PAULIST FATHERS. A MAN
OF GOD WHO IN THE MIDST OF MANY
CARES AND OF ABSORBING OCCUPA-
TIONS NEVER FAILED TO TEACH

AND TO PRACTICE THE
SPIRITUAL LIFE.



INTRODUCTION

Certain officials both of the National Council of Catholic

Men and of the National Broadcasting Company, trained to
judge the response to radio discourses, have informed me
that the interest of the listening public in the talks here

printed was unusual. Nothing could please a priest better

than to know that the attention of the people can be held
when he speaks to them cf the life of the soul. In these
days when war and politics and social science and economics
seem to so many of paramount importance, it is comforting
and encouraging to know that personal religion remains a
matter of deep and vital interest.



RELIGION

Address delivered on November 1, 1936

The most ancient and elementary desire of the

human heart is the desire for God. This passionate

longing of man for God is not only ancient but abor-

iginal, not only deep-seated, but ineradicable. At

certain times, and in some places, scepticism and

materialism seem to prevail, but irreligion never

really gets deep into the soul of the race. Religion

always recurs, when artificial restraint is lifted, and

if the restraint be prolonged, religion bursts forth

with violence. It cannot be permanently suppressed,

any more than a volcano can be smothered. Religion

has been (as they say) “discredited” in every cen-

tury and every generation. But the invidious task of

driving out religion from men’s hearts always has

to be done over again. Man reverts invariably to

what is natural to him. The most thorough, syste-

matic attempt to wean man away from God is now

in progress in Moscow and throughout Soviet Rus-

sia. But if the Bolshevik leaders had studied the

history of revolutions, especially of religious revolu-

tions, they would have shunned the absurdity of pro-

scribing religion. They are but repeating the blund-

ers of the past. Their only original contribution to

the propaganda of atheism is a new slogan, “Relig-

ion is the opiate of the people.” But religion is not

to be slain with slogans. Nor can it be obliterated

by governmental decrees, no matter how relentlessly

and cruelly they may be enforced. If it were possible

to destroy all churches, temples, and synagogues,

and to massacre every priest and every minister of

religion, religion would spring up again out of the

soil, and out of the human heart. The earth will not



6 THE LIFE OF THE SOUL

be rid of religion until it is rid of man. For man is

incurably religious. Any one who, like Jesus Christ,

“knows what is in man,” is aware of what has been

called, quite aptly, “the inveterate mysticism of the

human heart.”

It will be interesting therefore to consider the

precise nature of this universal and indestructible

phenomenon, religion. So let us ask the question,

“What is Religion?” and let us come at our answer

by means of a process of elimination.

There is a modern notion that the only safe and

sane religion is morality
—

“morality touched with

emotion,” as Matthew Arnold used to say. To live

clean, to work hard, to do good, to pay one’s debts,

to be a desirable citizen—and all that—is doubtless
praiseworthy. But it is not religion. Ethical cul-

ture bears the same relation to religion as a marble

statue bears to a creature of flesh and blood. All

“natural religions” remain the playthings of little

cliques of the soi-disante elite. Man, in the mass,

will have nothing to do with them. He demands the

supernatural, the mystical. True, this craving for

the supernatural may open the door to superstition.

But the human race has never been excessively chary

of superstition. It will risk a little superstition

rather than denature religion.

Nor is religion to be confounded with philosophy.

Philosophy is the pursuit of Truth, perhaps we may

say, the worship of Truth. Now Truth is God, and
hence to worship Truth might seem the same as to

worship God. But religion is more than philosophy.

A man may philosophize for a lifetime, and scarcely
experience one moment of religious feeling, or per-

form one act of religion.

There is (to mention but one difference) a sense



RELIGION 1

of certainty in religion that is wanting in philos-

ophy. In pursuit of truth, the philosopher will

follow one path for some distance, become per-

plexed, and retrace his steps, only to try another,

and yet another road to his goal. But the religious

man once he has found his road, holds to it, and as

Chesterton has said of St. Joan of Arc, he “goes

down it like a thunderbolt.” To change the meta-

phor, the philosophical mind plays with truths, jug-

gles truths, scrutinizes them, selects and rejects

them, throws them down and picks them up again;

but the religious man lays hold on Truth, and says

to Truth, “I will not let Thee go.” “0 Truth, my

God, make me one with Thee, in everlasting love,”

cries a Kempis. Has any philosopher loved truth so

passionately?

Again, religion is not synonymous with theology.

A man may be profoundly religious, and care but
little for theology. In his impetuosity he may even

utter words that seem to indicate disdain for theol-

ogy. To quote again the author of the Imitation of

Christ, “What signifies making a great dispute about

hidden and obscure things. . . and what matter is

it to us of genera or species. He to whom the Eter-

nal Word speaketh is delivered from a multitude of

opinions. What doth it profit thee to dispute learn-

edly of the Trinity, if thou be wanting in humility,

and so be displeasing to the Trinity?” Evidently

the gentle saint Who wrote these words was a bit im-

patient with some professional theologians, if not

with theology itself. But no one questions his being

genuinely and deeply religious. Nor would even the

most zealous champion of orthodoxy deny that re-

ligion pure and simple often exists in a soul inno-

cent of theology. In fact, it is a familiar and favor-



8 THE LIFE OF THE SOUL

ite thought in theological circles that the “old wo-

man telling her beads under the pulpit” may love

God, and be loved of God more than the learned

Doctor of Divinity.

Religion, therefore, is not identical with moral-

ity, or philosophy, or theology. What then is relig-

ion?

Without attempting to give, at this moment, an

adequate theological definition, let us say that pri-

marily religion is the recognition of the fact that all

creation is mysterious and points to an Ultimate and

Eternal Mystery beyond this visible universe. The

world in which we live is filled with mystery, and

the sense of mystery is akin to the instinct of relig-

ion. I do not say that one who senses the mystery

in the universe is necessarily religious. A poet or a
philosopher may recognize the presence of mystery

and yet not be professedly religious. But the poet,

the artist, the musician, the philosopher, the scien-

tist, the scholar, in fine all who seek after truth or

beauty, are, knowingly or unknowingly, “searchers

after God.” If once they could but recognize that

the all-pervading Mystery is personal, then the zeal

of the scholar, the rapture and ecstasy of the artist

and the poet, would become religious experiences.

He is “not far from every one of us,” says St. Paul,

quoting a pagan poet. “In him we live, and move,

and are.” He is like the atmosphere, which we can-

not see, but in which and by which we live. He is

more. He is like some one close to us, but invisible.

“Our eyes are held” that we cannot see Him. But

we “seek the Lord if haply [we] may feel after Him

and find Him.”

Lovers of Truth and Beauty, however they may

differ, or imagine that they differ one from another,



RELIGION 9

are all lovers of God. Some of them need to be

warned in the words of St. Augustine, “seek what ye

seek, but it is not where ye seek it.” But whether

they seek wisely or unwisely, in the true direction or

in the false, they are all restless with the passion for

God: “Thou hast made us for Thyself, 0 God, and

our hearts are restless until they find rest in

Thee.”

Not only poets and other men of unusual talent,

but all men (except those who have been quite de-

generated by an artificial civilization) are aware of

an elusive but ever-present Reality behind the things

that appear. “We cannot see His form but we can

see His shadow. We cannot hear His Voice, but we

can hear His footfall.” The nearness of the Unseen

baffles us, provokes us, leads us on. The presence

of mystery subdues us, chastens us, makes us tread

softly wherever we go. All ground is Holy Ground.

Every bush may, as we gaze at it, become a burning

bush. The poet, or the prophet, or the saint, is

merely one who sees a bit clearer than the rest of

us, and who, seeing, has the gift of telling, at least to

some extent, what he sees. The poet, perhaps above

other men, is a seer. If he be no seer, he is no poet.

If he be a seer indeed, he can see beauty and glory,

not only in a sunset and a waterfall, or a snow-cap-

ped mountain, but in those things that to the unim-

aginative (that is, to those who cannot see the un-

seen) are prosaic and sordid. Wordsworth has the

truth,

“There was a time when meadow, grove and stream,

The earth and every common sight,

To me did seem apparelled in celestial light.”

I have seen not only paintings but mere etchings,



10 THE LIFE OF THE SOUL

lines graven upon steel that made a spot in the slums

as beautiful as the streets and squares of fairyland.

Joseph Pennell has made us aware of the strange

unexpected beauty of the Ghetto, of the filthy

wharves and tumble-down rookeries under the piers

of a bridge, of shanties built haphazard of odds and

ends salvaged from a city dump.

You and I had called these things hideous. The

artist enables us to see that even in the forlorn by-

product of an ugly civilization beauty lies hidden

and may be revealed, if one have the eye for it. The

“realist” may protest, “I cannot see it.” No, but if

he could see it, he might become a Pennell, a Whist-

ler, or even perhaps a Turner. We all remember the

anecdote of the matter-of-fact fellow who, standing

before a Turner masterpiece, said “I never saw a

sunset like that!” and the retort of the artist who

happened to hear him, “Don’t you wish you could!”

The reason we don’t see beauty in “every

common sight” is that we haven’t the eye—and what
is more important—the soul of the artist. Or per-
haps it is because we have been “unfaithful to the

heavenly vision.” Even the poets have to bewail,

upon occasion, the loss of “angel faces” which they

had “loved long since and lost awhile.” Like New-

man, Wordsworth laments “the things that I have

seen I now can see no more.” For “there hath pass-

ed away a glory from the earth.” The poet grieves,

for he knows that with the passing of the vision he

has lost contact with Ultimate Reality. So if the

universe ceases for us to be mystical, an intimation

of immortality and eternity, it is because we have

lost or have never possessed the seeing eye. Shake-

speare could find “tongues in trees, books in the

running brooks, sermons in stones and good in



RELIGION 11

everything." And says a Kempis, “If only thy heart

were right, every created thing would be to thee a

mirror of life and a book of holy doctrine. There is

no creature so little and so vile that it showeth not

forth the goodness of God.”

Pity therefore the poor Philistine whose only

world is that of brick walls and cement roads, for

whom the woods are only so much timber, and a

mountain but a heap of slag, the ocean a dreary

waste to be crossed if possible without being looked

at
;
pity the dull-witted materialist to whom the stars

in heaven are only globes of vapor in a state of ig-

nition.

The religious man can say to such as these “I

have a meat to eat that you know not of. I have a

world to live in that you can never see
;
I have a se-

cret source of joy that prevents my being crushed by
what one of your own poets has called

“The heavy and insupportable weight

Of this weary and unintelligible world.”

It is easy to say that the poet or the mystic re-

produces visions that exist only in his own imagina-

tion. But the fact that we cannot see what he sees

is no proof that it is not there. Even we see it after

he sees it, for he makes us see it. The painter who

puts on canvas, or the etcher who puts on paper,
only the crass thing that strikes the carnal eye is no

artist. He must make us see what the eye does not
see. It is so with the poet. He must make us see
what the “eye hath not seen,” and hear what “ear

hath not heard.” Tennyson lamented, “I would that

my tongue could utter the thoughts that arise in
me.” Every seer sees more than he can tell. St.



12 THE LIFE OF THE SOtfL

Paul, St. Teresa, all the prophets and poets and mys-

tics, tell us much of the other world, and then com-

plain that they can’t even begin to tell us.

All the universe, then, is mystery. But even

more, man is mystery. Human nature is more in-

scrutable than any visible or tangible object. They

who deny the mystery in man can never have

studied man. Properly understood, the heart and

mind of man are a revelation of God. For man is

made “in the image and likeness of God”, and to

know man is to begin to know God. Man is mystery

more baffling than either the inanimate or the brute

creation.

For that reason, the outstanding geniuses of the

human race are not those who have studied the

course of planets around the sun, not those who have

spent long lives humped over books in libraries, with

their be-spectacled eyes riveted on some “volume

of forgotten lore”; not those who potter about in

chemical laboratories scrutinizing the contents of

test tubes, or peering through the lenses of a micro-

scope to spy upon the antics of wriggling bacilli;

not those who ensconce themselves in a cage in the

heart of the jungle to catch upon a phonographic

disk the sounds that they are pleased to call the

speech of monkeys—not these are the superlatively
great men of our race, but those who have by intui-

tion the uncanny power of penetrating flesh and

blood, of reading the revelation that has been writ-

ten on the “fleshly tables of the heart,” and then of

revealing man to himself. The sacred Scriptures

are as much a revelation of man as they are of God.

Men used to say, “Philosophy is the handmaid of

religion.” Men will say, in centuries to come, “Sci-

ence is the coadjutor of religion.” The scientist, like



RELIGION 13

the theologian, is trying to penetrate the veil that

separates the seen from the unseen, the known from

the unknown. And every time the scientist sees

something beyond, he also sees, in the selfsame flash

of light, that the unknown world is vaster and more

marvelous than he had hitherto imagined. I wonder

that scientists, at work in their laboratories or their

observatories, do not collapse to their knees, and

bow their heads in silent adoration of the vast Un-

seen. Perhaps they do. Keats imagined that the

astronomers and explorers felt the same mystic ex-

altation as the poets, “Then felt I like some watcher

of the skies when a new planet swims into his ken.”

Is there not ecstasy and silent worship under the

little domes of observatories, as under the big dome

of heaven? And did not “stout Cortes and all his

men, look at each other with a wild surmise, silent

upon a peak in Darien” ?

This is religion, and poetry, and science. They

have all essentially the same Ultimate Object. We
have no miracle in religion greater than the miracle

of the rising and setting of the sun. The rotation of

the earth upon its axis is as bewildering to the

brain as the procession of the Son and the Holy

Ghost from the Father. Electricity is as mysterious

and as incomprehensible as the Blessed Eucharist.

The origin of a human being, from the coalition of a

couple of microscopic particles, which bear no more

resemblance to a human body than an invisible mite

of marble dust to the Venus de Milo, is so great a

mystery that the Church insists that marriage is a

matter of religion, a sacrament. All is holy, all is

good, save sin—just as all is mystery. They that
have caught a glimpse of these things have com-

menced to be religious.



14 THE LIFE OF THE SOUL

They have commenced to be religious. But it

cannot be said that they have attained to the fullness

of religion. The object of divine worship cannot be

blank bewildering mystery. The object of worship

is a Person, God. Religion is not merely awe and

adoration. It is love and possession of the Beloved.

“What therefore you worship, without knowing it,

(the Unknown God), that I preach to you,” says St.

Paul. And the declaration is that God has indeed

come very close to us. God has become incarnate, in

the Person of Jesus Christ. The last word of Revela-

tion is “The Word was made Flesh.” God, the in-

finite Mystery, has become visible and tangible.

“That which was from the beginning, which we have

heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we

have looked upon, and our hands have handled. . .

we declare unto you,” says the Apostle, St. John.

Man, therefore, begins with a sense of awe in

the presence of all-pervading mystery, rises to a

knowledge that the Mystery is God; comes to know

that God is not a mere Force or a Presence, but a

Person. He reaches out to that Person, demanding

union. The union is achieved. Man and God are

united. This is Religion.



PRAYER 15

PRAYER

Address delivered on November 8, 1936

William James in an epoch-making volume, The

Varieties of Religious Experience, which might have

been titled in the modern mode “A Psychologist

Looks at Religion”, wrote “We hear in these days of

scientific enlightenment a great deal of discussion

about the efficacy of Prayer. Many reasons are

given us why we should not pray. Others give reas-

ons why we should pray. Very little is said of the

reason we do pray. The reason is simple: We pray
because we cannot help praying.”

The famous scholar arrived at that conviction

from a study of the human mind. He could have

reached the same conclusion by a study of human

history. All men pray. They have always prayed.

They pray not because they have been taught to

pray, or commanded to pray, but because they are

“made that way.”

I say all men pray. Let me make a reservation:

all who are genuinely human pray. Nowadays we

have become familiar with the phrase “The Pen-

alties of Civilization”. Doctors of psychology who

study the mind and doctors of medicine who minister
to the body, tell us that cancer, for example, is a

penalty of civilization, and tuberculosis, and cardiac

weakness, and venereal disease, and insanity. Civili-

zation is of course in general a boon, but we pay a
terrible price for it. One of its evil consequences is
to dehumanize us. I once heard the president of an

enormous state university advising the students to

be religious. “Any one” he declared, “who is not re-
ligious is degenerate”. Strong word, but not too



16 THE LIFE OF THE SOUL

strong. A man who has ceased to pray, who has
been dissuaded from prayer, who has been shamed

away from prayer has ceased in that degree to be a

man. Man, as man, prays.

In front of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston

there is a particularly striking equestrian statue

of an all-but-naked Indian sitting on his horse with

arms outstretched, head held aloft, and eyes appar-

ently attempting to pierce the heavens. Oddly

enough his attitude—except of course the horse

—

is that of the early Christians frescoed upon the

walls of the Catacombs. But who taught the savage

to pray? No one but nature. No one but his own

heart and his own instincts. Again: the Arab in

the desert dismounts from his camel, spreads his

prayer-rug upon the sands, turns to the rising or

the setting sun and prays. If you ask him “Why”,

he will not attempt an intricate theological ex-

planation, but will probably echo “Why? Why do I

eat? Why do I sleep? Why do I breathe? Why does
the water gush up in the oasis? Why does the sun
climb to the top of the sky and slip down again to

the horizon? Why does the wind blow dunes in the
sands of the desert?” The untutored Arab, speaking

in that fashion, will not know it, but he is exemplify-

ing an axiom of Scholastic Philosophy Agere sequi-

tur esse, “Our actions flow from our nature”. Birds

fly, horses gallop, fish swim, serpents crawl. And

for the same reason man prays. It is his nature.

William James speaks of “these days of scientific

enlightenment.” I think I detect in his use of the

phrase a little pinch of the salt of sarcasm. To hear

some men talk you might imagine that there is no

other name under heaven whereby men may be

saved than the name of “Science”, Omniscient,



PRAYER 17

Omnipotent “Science” ! But in these days of bomb-

ing planes, mustard gas, and bacteriological war-

fare, the dreadful fact is beginning to dawn upon

our minds that instead of saving us, science may

ruin us. It certainly will if we permit science to

supplant nature, smother nature, suffocate nature.

“Before Abraham was made, I am”, says Jesus. “Be-

fore Science was made I am”, says Nature, “I was

here before Science and I will be here after Science.”

When science—arrogant science—has done its worst
to destroy humanity, it will destroy itself, but Na-

ture will remain.

I would not convey the impression that only the

uncivilized, those who are called “children of na-

ture”, pray. It is possible to develop the intelligence

and yet to remain wholly human. The wisest man

that ever lived—in heathendom—Socrates, prayed
upon occasion for twenty-four hours on end. The

orator Demosthenes, whose mental powers much

more than his vocal gifts account for his unsur-

passed eloquence, commenced all his speeches with a

prayer. Pericles, leader of the Athenian State at

the very apogee of its glory prayed. Epictetus, who

shares with Seneca and Marcus Aurelius a reputa-

tion as one of the chief sages of the Greco-Roman

world, has a sentence that is almost word for word

identical with one of Thomas a Kempis. “When thou

hast shut thy door and darkened thy room”, says

Epictetus, “think not that thou art alone, for God is

with thee.” “Enter into thy chamber”, says a Kem-

pis, “close the door behind thee and call to thee

Jesus thy beloved.”

You may find in the ruins of ancient civilization

in Mexico and Peru graffiti, pictures cut with steel

upon stone, of Aztecs and Incas in the attitude of



18 THE LIFE OF THE SOUL

prayer. Even in Buddhism, sometimes said to be a

religion without a God, there is prayer, endless

prayer, one might almost say excessive prayer. I

have seen in a motion picture travelogue young Jap-

anese women praying before a statue of Buddha,

holding the palms of their hands together like a

communicant approaching the altar-rail in the

Catholic Church.

Enough ! We need not cover the globe and sum-
mon every race of mankind to bear witness to the

universal practice of prayer. Suffice it to say that

prayer is as old as man and as extensive as human

life on this globe. True, there are certain persons of

a curiously arrogant mental type to whom the tes-

timony of all mankind means nothing. Unmindful

of Edmund Burke’s familiar warning not to launch

an indictment against a whole nation, they do not

hesitate to press an indictment against the entire

human race. “If all men pray”, they declare with

a fool’s self-satisfaction, “all men are supersti-

tious”. But is there any superstition more extrava-

gant or more offensive than that of the man who

says, “All men are fools and I alone am wise” ?

All men pray. But I have not said they all pray

wisely and well. I have not said they all pray to

the One True God. They may pray to a stick or a

stone, the sun, the moon, the stars, to a hideously

graven, grotesquely painted image of a demon, to a

sacred bull, a crocodile, a cat, a white monkey. Men

have been known so vile as to worship a woman.

Rudyard Kipling speaks of the fool “who makes his

prayer to a rag and a bone and a hank o’ hair”.

Many a man has said to a woman: “You are my

deity; I will leave wife and family for you. I will

go with you to the ends of the earth: yes to hell.”



PRAYER 19

And that is the type of man who says “I never

pray”. I have known of a man whose creed was “No

God, no Soul, no future life”, stealing out to a

graveyard day after day, and when asked to explain

his apparently morbid action saying, “I kneel at

my wife’s grave and whisper my thoughts to her”.

No God to pray to but he must pray to something, so

he prays to dust and ashes.

I repeat: so long as a vestige of humanity re-

mains in a man, he must pray, to God, to man, to

woman, to inanimate nature, to a sunset, to a moun-

tain (the northwest Indians speak of Rainier as

“the Mountain that was God”), to a painting or a

poem or a symphony, to art, to science, to demons,

to something. In certain particularly pathological

cases, for example Nabuchodonosor and Napoleon,

where vanity becomes colossal and sanity breaks

down under the impact of repeated adulation, a man

comes to consider himself as a kind of God. This, of

course, is the last infirmity of what may once have

been a noble mind.

But rightly directed prayer is the unburdening

of the heart of all mankind to God, it is a sigh well-

ing up from the unfathomed depths of the soul,

flinging itself from the lips of all the race; it is a

great universal cry, “Thou hast made us for Thy-

self, 0 God, and our hearts are restless until they

find rest in Thee”. One might as well attempt to

clamp a metal cap upon the crater of a volcano, or

stuff his fist into the mouth of a geyser, as to at-

tempt to prevent a human being from pouring out

his heart and soul to God.

None the less, the attempt is made, especially in

these “scientific” skeptical days, and I think it not

unreasonable to suspect that hence comes the ap-



20 THE LIFE OF THE SOUL

palling increase in mental disease, and in the un-

expected outbursts of violent passion recorded more

and more frequently upon the front page of the

newspapers. It was a great preacher Lacordaire

who said, and I suppose others have said it after

him, that prayer saves us from going mad. Psychol-

ogists of the newer schools explain that mental

diseases and passionate outbursts are the result of

the repression of the natural instincts, and they

recommend us to “release the inhibitions”. They

are half way right. Their mistake is in forgetting

that our natural instincts are not all carnal: we

have also irresistible spiritual aspirations. “Re-

lease the inhibitions”? Yes, release the inhibitions

laid upon the spirit of man, inhibitions of shame,

and false education, inhibitions arising from flip-

pant ridicule by the intelligentsia who have de-

humanized themselves quite as much, though in a

different way, as the gigolos and the lounge-lizards,

and who having made themselves less than complete-

ly human with pseudo-science and perverted philos-

ophy, seem to take it as an affront that young men

and women as yet unspoiled should worship God.

And so, in self justification, they do their utmost

with the Voltairean weapon of ridicule or with the

Satanical argument “There is no God. You pray to

yourself. You are the only God.”

They think they know much. They think they

know all. But what they don’t know is that human

nature is more fundamental than science or philos-

ophy, more irrepressible than the fires at the heart

of the earth, or the typhoons, hurricanes, tornadoes,

tidal waves that from time to time lash the sea to

madness and devastate the land.

Leave a man alone and he will be religious ; cease



PRAYER 2]

to repress his spiritual emotions and he will give

them vent in prayer. Tell him he must not pray and

you shut him up in a sphere of brass. He will beat

upon the walls of his prison until his hands are

broken and bloody; he will cry out in desperation

until his strength wanes and he can cry no more;

he will end with insanity unless you permit him

what William James used to call “a healthy minded

religion”.

These expressions may seem to smack of ex-

travagance. I am aware of it. And I dare say

some will think them melodramatic. But I am con-

vinced that no expression can exaggerate the evil

of the suppression of the religious instinct, the

paralysis of the impulse to pray. A terrible fact con-
fronts us in this modern day of super-civilization.

Physicians, psychologists, moralists, social workers,

statesmen are worried over the prodigious increase

in pathological phenomena. Every humane person

desires ardently that these ills that beset humanity

be cured. But before they can be cured, they must

be made good. Almost all the new psychologies em-

phasize the abnormal, and I think in that they are

right. But they are wrong if they think that an

unhealthy mind can necessarily be cured by tinker-

ing with the body. Mental disease calls for a mental

cure. And they work in the dark who do not see that

irreligion is a mental disease. They persist in look-

ing upon man as a creature compacted of flesh and

blood, bone and sinew, nerves and blood vessels and

ductless glands, physical and chemical elements.

Man is all that indeed, but he is principally some-

thing more. What makes him man is spirit, soul.

Deny that, deal with man as if soul did not exist

and you shall never cure him. Blind yourself to the



22 THE LIFE OF THE SOUL

fact that man is man, deny that human nature has

spiritual as well as carnal instincts, deal with man

as you deal with a beast, and you will destroy man.

Recognize his spiritual aspirations, encourage them,

provide them with their natural outlet, that is to say

have recourse to religion and prayer, and you will

save man, the individual man and the race of men.



MYSTICISM 23

MYSTICISM

Address delivered on November 15, 1936

I once happened to sit in at an impromptu dis-

cussion between two clergymen on the question : “Is

there an exoteric and an esoteric Christianity?” It

sounds forbidding, and almost any one who found

himself trapped, so to speak, in the room with the

two reverend debaters, might well have made some

excuse to leave, or even to have rushed away with-

out formality from an argument on such a seem-

ingly impractical subject. However, I held my

ground and listened, and was glad in the event that

I hadn’t been frightened off by a couple of high-

sounding Greek words.

For after all, what they were getting at was

simple: is Christianity, like Buddhism, a system of

secrets, getting more and more mysterious as one

goes further along; or like Freemasonry in which

the neophyte with the first three degrees knows little

or nothing of the awful cryptic knowledge communi-

cated gradually as one progresses to the thirty-

second and the thirty-third degrees?

That is to say, is the rank outsider kept totally

ignorant of the true nature of—now let us say
specifically—Catholicism? Is the novice who has
received mere initiation by baptism uninformed of

the hidden and, to use the debaters’ word, “esoteric”

truths revealed only to the elect, the past masters

of the craft?

Catholics, I know will laugh at the question, but

let me say simply and sincerely for the benefit of

those who know our religion only from the outside,

that we have no secrets, no cryptic knowledge, no



24 THE LIFE OF THE SOUL

esoteric doctrine. Nothing is concealed from the

neophyte, nothing is kept back from the proselyte.

Even the “penny catechism,” as it used to be called,

tells all our doctrines and our practices. The six

year old child who has memorized his Sunday School

lesson knows the content of Catholicism as well as

the professor of Dogmatic or Moral Theology in a

Catholic university. We do not dole out the sacred
treasures of the Faith little by little; we make no

distinction between the initiated and the elect. “Woe

is me if I preach not the Gospel”, says St. Paul. He

meant the whole Gospel. Our priests are not “yogi”,

we do not surround ourselves with an atmosphere of

fictitious mystery. We do not assemble in a dim
light breathing an atmosphere saturated with nar-

cotizing fumes of Oriental incense to perform some

pretentious pseudo-mystical rite. We look into no
crystal globes, we do not deliberately induce a

trance, emerging painfully, and indeed with signs of

extreme agony, to communicate a lot of esoteric tosh

that bewilders the client, as the enigmatic utterances

of the Delphic Oracle bewildered its consultants of

old. To speak simply, we consider all that sort of

thing as “the bunk”, superstition, fraud, a “racket”,

and in some cases an incentive to sexual abnormali-

ties.

No, we have none of this dangerous wicked non-

sense in Catholicism. Our religion is simple. We

glory in the fact that our Faith is that of the

common people. We do not demand extraordinary

intellectual power or a capacity for high mystical

experience of those who worship at our altars. We

do not delude converts with the promise of super-

natural ecstasies, raptures, visions. We are content

if they say their prayers, attend Holy Mass, worship



MYSTICISM 25

God in their own measure, and keep the Command-

ments.

Nevertheless Catholicism is a religion of mysti-

cism. Any religion that is more than a system of

philosophical thought, more than an interpretation

of life, more than a moral code, must be mystical.

For after all, what is religion but contact with the

other world? Cardinal Manning in his little classic

on the Priesthood, says that the priest saying Mass

“stands upon the shore of the eternal world”. As a

matter of fact, both priest and people do more than

that; they attempt to cross the boundaries of the

eternal world. Most of us can do so only in thought,

in desire, in aspiration. But saints have succeeded

where we have failed, they have gone on where we

have halted. Religion rightly understood is not a

dull dogged prosaic uninspired manner of life,

though Puritans and Pharisees and formalists have

made it seem so. Religion is adventure, the kind of

adventure that even the boldest conquistadores never

dared attempt. We marvel at the courage of such
soldiers and explorers as Cortes

—
“Stout Cortes”,

Keats calls him—and Pizzaro and de Soto, who
landed with a company of men upon the shores of a

vast continent (perhaps they didn’t dream just how

vast it was), burning their ships behind them, setting

forth undaunted to penetrate dense jungles, slashing

for themselves a path through the dense tangle of

the virgin wilderness, fording treacherous streams,

themselves and their horses heavy with armor and

other impedimenta; climbing mountains, crossing

merciless deserts, risking ambuscades, fighting sav-

ages every foot of the way, bogging down in

malarial swamps, suffering hunger and thirst
;
their

numbers decimated with fever in malarial bayous;



26 THE LIFE OF THE SOUL

yet pressing on a thousand miles and more, in from

the sea coast. Yes, these were heroes, but their valor

is not to be compared with that of the saint-adven-

turers after God, explorers of a terra incognita.

These conquistadores of the supernatural life have

undergone such a preparation for the grand adven-

ture, such an askesis, as makes us cowardly mortals

shudder; they flagellated and macerated the flesh,

inflicted upon themselves pitiable punishments; de-

liberately they hungered and thirsted; the flame of

holy desire burned sometimes so fiercely in their

hearts that they were compelled to run out of doors

and bare their breasts to the winter air; they flung

themselves naked into brambles; they mortified re-

lentlessly the lust of the eyes, the lust of the flesh,

and the pride of life. Even to read of the austerities

of St. Francis of Assisi, St. Catherine of Siena, St.

Peter of Alcantara, St. Lydwine of Schiedam and a

host of others, makes our blood run cold, and per-

haps we are tempted to say “These are mad, these

that crucify themselves, these that cry aut pati aut

mori, If I cannot suffer I prefer to die”. But as one

writer on mysticism has said—I quote him because
his testimony is that of a non-Catholic and he cannot

be suspected of prejudice in favor of the saints

—

“these gaunt and outre saints, with their grotesque

and tragic self-stultifications, succeeded where a

broader, saner way of life has failed. Their life has

a tang, a salt sting, which ours lacks. Can we men-

tion representatives of a more reasonable and genial

Christianity who have subjugated the world as

these did?. . . Even today they conquer where we

fail, and carry citadels that resist our every on-

slaught. Men and women who never darken church

doors and barely hang on to the outmost fringe of



MYSTICISM 27

Christian society are stirred by the flaming ardor of

St. Theresa, touched and purified by the dewy self-

communings of Blessed Angela of Foligno and awed

by the spiritual magnificence of St. Catherine of

Siena.”
*

But let us make no mistake. It was not the aim

of the mystic saints to conquer this world or to win

the hearts of otherwise insensate men and women,

What they aimed at was the other world. He Whom

they sought to win, shall I dare say conquer, was

God. They scourged their bodies not like the fakirs

of India who seem to believe in punishment for

punishment’s sake, not to be seen of men and be

called holy. They lacerated the flesh that the spirit

might escape. The soul within them felt smothered

and suffocated by the heavy, torpid beastly importu-

nities of the body, its craving for physical comfort,

indolence, and carnal satisfaction. They were not

content, like the indecisive, mooning, brooding vacil-

lating Prince Hamlet to cry “0 that this too too solid

flesh would melt !” They whipped it, they lashed and

bruised it, they burned it up with the fire of love,

and when the flesh had been conquered the soul

burst forth and went winging its flight up to the

very battlements of heaven.

Compared with these adventurers—these con-
quistadores of the sky—Stout Cortes and his men,
Pizzaro, de Soto and all your Magellans, your Bal-

boas, and your Captain Cooks, are stay-at-homes,

sit-by-the-fire armchair explorers. The mystic

saints indeed have climbed their mountains—sym-
bolic mountains higher and more rugged than moun-

tains of sand and stone and ice—they too have ford-
* E. Herman, The Meaning and Value of Mysticism. London.
James Clarke. 2nd ed. June 1916. p. 179.



28 THE LIFE OF THE SOUL

ed raging torrents; ventured into quagmires and

quicksands
;
they have cut their way through thickly

tangled jungles; they have trod the burning sands

of fiery deserts
;
they have endured fevers, they have

slain dragons, they have fought bare-handed not

with savages but with demons ; yes, they have grap-

pled with God as Jacob wrestled with the angel; and

like Jacob they have cried “I will not let Thee go un-

til Thou Bless Me,” or with the Beloved in the Can-

ticle of Canticles “I have found Him Whom my soul
loveth, I have held Him and I will not let Him go”.
“0 God”, they say, “I have crossed Thy moats,

climbed Thy battlements, beaten down the barriers

that protect Thee. I have conquered devils, I have

wrestled with angels, I have made my way to Thy

Presence, I have snatched away the veil of Mystery

that shields Thy face from mortal gaze, I have stolen

a glimpse of Thy beatific Countenance. ‘No man can

see God and live?’ Well, if death be the penalty for

snatching a glimpse of Thy Face, 0 God, I am happy

to die. Why must my earthly sojourning be pro-
longed? Oh, that this mortal could put on immor-

tality. Oh, that this corruption could be clothed with

incorruption
!”

But they have not died. By some strange miracle

they have returned to this nether world. “From that

bourne no traveller returns”? Well, these travellers,

these adventurers, these intruders into the kingdom

of bliss have returned, though with agonizing reluc-

tance. And the mystic reports to his earth-bound

brethren “Eye hath not seen, ear hath not heard, nor

hath it entered into the mind of man to conceive

what things God hath in store for them that love

Him.” “I know such a man”, says St. Paul (speak-

ing cryptically), “I know such a man (whether in



MYSTICISM 29

the body, or out of the body, I know not : God know-

eth) : that he was caught up into paradise, and heard

secret words, which it is not granted to man to

utter.” And, in consequence, he the most practical

and unsentimental of men, he the last man to indulge

in day-dreams, he the man of action par excellence,

exclaims : I desire to die
—

“To me to die is gain”.

Now I know that all these mystic rhapsodies are

dismissed by dogmatists as “hallucinations”. For

certain arrogant persons are convinced that noth-

ing can be true unless they understand and approve

it, nothing can happen unless they themselves have

experienced it. They have never read, or reading

they have not understood, “There are more things in

heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamed of in

your philosophy”. They really don’t deserve an ans-

wer. They are like those unfortunates who, them-

selves tone-deaf, seeing enthusiasts go mad over

music, cry “Fools! Lunatics! Pretenders!” Or like

the man who confessed that when people talked of

the songs of birds, he always had thought they were

indulging in poetic license. Because of some consti-

tutional imperfection his ears had never detected the

fact that birds sing. And there is, of course, the

story of the color-blind realist who had never seen

a Turner sunset. Poor souls! the chief joys of life

are denied them, they have eyes and they see not,

ears and they hear not. They have no mystic sense.

In a word, they lack soul
;
and so they make bold to

declare dogmatically that nothing exists but what

can be touched, handled, weighed, measured.

But none the less the universal phenomenon of

mysticism continues. As Evelyn Underhill says “We

meet mystics in the east and the west; in the an-

cient, mediaeval, and modern worlds. Their one oas-



30 THE LIFE OF THE SOUL

sion appears to be the prosecution of a certain spiri-

tual and intangible quest : the finding of a ‘way out’

or a ‘way back’ to some desirable state in which

alone they can satisfy their craving for absolute

truth. This quest, for them, has constituted the

whole meaning of life. They have made for it with-

out effort sacrifices which have appeared enormous

to other men: and it is an indirect testimony to its

objective actuality, that whatever the place or per-

iod in which they have arisen, their aims, doctrines

and methods have been substantially the same. Their

experience, therefore, forms a body of evidence, cur-

iously self-consistent and often mutually explana-

tory, which must be taken into account before we

can add up the sum of the energies and potentialities

of the human spirit, or reasonably speculate on its

relations to the unknown world which lies outside

the boundaries of sense”.

But that passage is a kind of argument. And I

feel about argument for mysticism what Dr. Samuel

Johnson exclaimed in his blunt way when Boswell

asked him what argument he would use in favor of

prayer, “Argument, Sir! There is no argument.

Prayer needs no argument.” But I will go so far as

to call attention to the one obvious fact, obvious but

forgotten, that mystical experiences, like miracles,

should not be dismissed without investigation at

least in this “scientific” age. Time was when men

like David Hume could declare that no evidence

—

however complete—could prove a miracle. But now
the tune of the skeptics has changed. They admit

the facts but question the explanation. At the grotto

of Lourdes many skeptical investigators have been

witness to the fact that the lame walk, the blind

see, the deaf hear; that poor bodies almost disinte-



MYSTICISM 31

grating with tuberculosis are instantaneously and

completely healed. But they say “Miracle? Miracle?

We cannot admit miracle ! The phenomena evidently

occur. But we have no explanation. Still we shun

the word miracle.”

Just so with mystical facts. They used to be dis-

missed as hallucination, suggestion, auto-hypnosis.

But now that some of the most capable psycholo-

gists have been constrained to admit the facts, no

one, unless he confesses himself hopelessly unscien-

tific, is free to dismiss the subject or to utter confi-

dent denials without investigation. Before tele-

scopes were invented any fool could deny the moun-

tains on the moon or the rings around Saturn. But

it would be a curiously psychopathic individual who

would now say7 “All those who use telescopes are vic-

tims of auto-hypnosis”. When St. Catherine of

Siena in ecstasy was elevated from the ground and

seemed to be insensible to her surroundings, certain

irreverent spectators passed a plank between her

body and the floor, and stuck knives into her to see

if the trance were real. The test was rough and

cruel; but it was more scientific than the denial by

an ignoramus of phenomena he has never taken the

pains to investigate.

But I apologize. Argument is really out of place.

Let us close not with argument but with affirmation.

There have been on this earth and there are today

men and women who by crucifixion of the flesh and

discipline of the soul have fitted themselves for

strange and wonderful spiritual experiences, rap-

tures, ecstasies, visions, not merely after the fashion

of poets, artists, composers and other men of genius,

but supernatural experiences quite transcending the

native powers of man. Some of these mystics have



32 THE LIFE OF THE SOUL

been so frequently lifted up to the supernal world as

to have their existence there rather than here. The

heavy sod to which our leaden feet are fastened is to

them comparatively unreal. Reality is elsewhere.

Reality is God. And they have plunged into that

Reality so often that it seems their home. They

have explored a realm into which we have no power

to enter. They have made discoveries that to us are.

though not incredible, incomprehensible. They have

gone in quest of God and they have found Him.

They have snatched a few minutes of Eternal Life

even before bodily death. It behooves us not to deny

their experience, still less to ridicule it, but to con-

template with awe and reverence the holy daring of

those who have fared forth, in the flesh or out of the

flesh, into a region that we know only by hearsay

and by faith, a region that we shall have to die to

conquer.



SELF-DISCIPLINE 33

SELF-DISCIPLINE

Address delivered on November 22, 1936

It is a curious fact—so curious as to seem in-
credible—that when Christianity first appeared the
pagans denounced the gentle harmless followers of

Jesus as “inimici humani generis”, “enemies of the

human race”. Mark you! not merely enemies of

Caesar, of the Empire, of the Greco-Roman civiliza-

tion, but of the human race—haters of mankind!
The accusation was, of course, preposterous. We

naturally ask “What can the heathen have had in

mind?” Christians were never misanthropes, pes-

simists, cynics, like Diogenes or Zeno or Cato, or like

the modern Schopenhauer. They did not believe, like

the Buddhists who came later, that existence is a

curse and that the only happiness is to cease to exist.

No, ours is a religion of optimism: “Gospel” means

“good news”. What then was in the back of the

head of the heathen when they made that perverse

accusation “Enemies of the human race?”

What really irked them was the simple fact that

the Christians didn’t approve of drunkenness and

other forms of debauchery, especially when prac-

tised under the pretext of religion. To us nowadays

the incredible thing is that pagans often went into

their temples not to pray but to indulge in obscene

orgies which they offered to the gods as an expres-

sion of religious adoration. Bacchus was the god of

drunkenness
;
a Bacchanal was a riot of drunkenness

in the dark. You may read it in Sienkiewicz’s Quo

Vadis. And indeed there was worse than drunken-

ness. The inseparable companion of Bacchus was

Venus, as they called the goddess of lust in Rome,



34 THE LIFE OF THE SOUL

or Isis in Egypt, or Diana at Ephesus. Bad as we

are today we have no parallel to such mad desecra-

tion of religion : to us the idea of combining worship

with prostitution and of calling shameless women

priestesses is so repugnant as to be unthinkable.

But to resume: what* the Greco-Romans, the

Egyptians and the Ephesians had in mind when they

called the followers of Jesus haters of the human

race was that the Christians preached and prac-

tised self-control, and believed religion impossible

without virtue and virtue impossible without the

subjugation of passion.

I say we have nothing like a religion of licen-

tiousness nowadays. But we have half a dozen

philosophies, some of them ostensibly “scientific”

—

magic word “Scientific”—which recommend a per-
iodical explosion if not a constant indulgence of ani-

mal passion. The theory is that the release of pas-

sion is necessary to the health of body and mind. We
have it in philosophy, and in poetry, and in that kind

of poetry which is philosophy. “Seize pleasure as it

flies”. “Gather ye rosebuds while ye may”, “Eat,

Drink and be Merry”; or as Omar Khayyam says,

“To drink wine and to make merry, such is my
scheme of life; to pay no heed to heretic or devotee

such is my creed”.

“some there are who tell

Of one who threatens he will toss to hell

The luckless pots he marred in making—Pish!
He’s a good fellow, and ’twill all be well”.

In those days as in ours there were some who be-

lieved in a “good God and a good time”. George

Sand goes so far as to resurrect the ancient pagan-

ism. She says, through the mouth of one of the



SELF-DiSCIFLINE 35

characters in her novel Lelia, “Anacreon has written

my liturgy ; I have taken antiquity as my model, the

goddesses of Greece for my divinities. To keep me

from despair I practice the religion of pleasure”.

Indeed so far have we reverted towards pagan-

ism that in every land and in all tongues there are

rollicking drinking songs which glorify the fruit of

the vine quite as fervently as Omar the Persian

sybarite who wrote the Rubaiyat, making of drunk-

enness a social virtue. In all large colleges where

youth congregate with the ostensible purpose of ob-

taining an education, over-indulgence in drink seems

to be considered a peccadillo and bawdiness is taken

merely as evidence that a boy is becoming a man.

Lasciviousness indeed is no longer a part of religion

but none the less there are temples in which the wor-

ship of wine, woman, and song is carried on night

after night and almost till dawn. Have not the

municipal authorities here in New York—and I dare
say elsewhere—been obliged to enact an ordinance
that night clubs where drunkenness is all but uni-

versal and where nakedness stalks unashamed, must

be closed before daybreak for fear that honest work-

ingmen on their way to their heavy tasks may not be

scandalized—or infuriated—by the sight of male and
female revellers emerging from these modern

shrines of Bacchus and Venus?

And any preacher or moralist who ventures to

excoriate these modern heathens, any one who, like

St. Paul who never minced words, dares upbraid

them “whose god is their belly and whose glory is

their shame” and to repeat the apostle’s warning

“Be not deceived, God is not mocked”, that they who

indulge in “fornication, uncleanness, immodesty,

luxury. . . drunkenness, revellings and such like



36 THE LIFE OF THE SOUL

. . . shall not obtain the kingdom of God” ; I say, if

a modern apostle makes bold to repeat and apply the

warnings of the ancient apostle, our latter day

heathen, like the Greeks and Romans, will try to

fasten upon him the libel “hater of mankind, enemy

of the human race”. St. John the Baptist, holiest of

men, gaunt with fasting, his loins girt about with a

leathern girdle, and a piece of camel’s hair over his

shoulders, his face unshaven, his hair unkempt, his

manners uncouth, was held no more out of place in

Herod’s court in the presence of the dancing girl

Salome and her vicious mother than any one who

should appear in the name of God at a modern night

club and warn the half-naked women on the stage

or at the tables and their escorts that they are

heathen engaged in reestablishing upon the earth, as

far as in them lies, the worship of the filthy pagan

deities. You know the epithets that would be flung

in the face of any such modern apostle: “fanatic”,

“kill-joy”, “zealot”, “religious maniac”, “puritan”,

“pharisee” ! the present-day equivalent of the

ancient inimici humani generis, “humanity-haters
!”

But there is, I must confess, one new element in

the modern resentment against any summons to self-

denial, any protest against self-indulgence. Several

new philosophies have been conveniently discovered

to prove to men and women that surrender to pas-

sion is a biological and physiological necessity. Car-

dinal Newman, speaking of the power of conscience,

declared that “no man sins without making an ex-

cuse to himself for his sin.” In his day, a century

ago, men used to invoke the maxim of Rousseau,

Sequere naturam, “Follow nature”. They meant,

however, “follow half your nature”, follow the

animal in you, forget the human; obey the flesh,



SELF-DISCIPLINE 37

ignore the spirit. In our own generation one man

has said, seriously and solemnly as if he were enun-

ciating an axiom of supreme ethical importance,

“man has done himself great harm by forgetting

that he is an animal”. As I read the history of the

race upon this globe I would never have accused man

of neglecting the animal element in his composite.

To me the calamity would seem to be that he has so

often forgotten the other human half of him. But

pseudo-philosophers and nowadays pseudo-scientists

continue to place in man’s mouth glib phrases

wherewith he may justify surrender to his appetites

and his lusts. The current idiom is now no longer

“Follow nature”, but “Release the inhibitions”

meaning “Let yourself go. If you put an obstacle in

the way of your instincts you will become morbid,

morose, neurotic, perhaps insane. So in the name

of psychology let yourself go! Release the inhibi-

tions !”

That comfortable recommendation, though doubt-

less reassuring to the self-indulgent, is not alto-

gether convincing to the true philosopher, not to say

the moralist. Those who are not easily hypnotized

by a word, even that potent word “Psychology”, ask

to know “which inhibitions are to be released.” The

inhibition that prevents striking and killing? The

inhibition that forbids stealing? or lying? or treach-

ery? or double-dealing? Or is there really only one

inhibition they have in mind, the one that keeps us

from doing unmentionable things? If so—and it is
so—a man needs no Sigmund Freud to give him that
immoral advice. The same suggestion was bandied

about, passed from man to man—and oh, the crime
of it—from man to boy centuries before the word
“psychology” was coined.



38 THE LIFE OF THE SOUL

As a matter of fact, the folly of self-indulgence,

the need of self-discipline, needs no theological

proof. A little knowledge of human nature will
suffice. Human nature is good and bad, both. God

created it good. But there must have been—there
was—to borrow another phrase from Newman,
“some aboriginal catastrophe”, some primitive de-

rangement that set man forever at odds not only

with God but with himself. Those who invoke

“psychology” so confidently seem to forget the pri-

mary psychological fact of remorse after sin. They

leave conscience, the most important phenomenon

in human history, altogether unexplained.

Also they speak much of evolution and of civil-

ization. But by some inexplicable hiatus in their

logic they seem not to recognize that if man always

“releases the inhibitions”, practices self-indulgence

and refuses self-discipline, neither evolution nor

civilization is possible. If we accept even for the

sake of the argument, the hypothesis that man has

evolved slowly and painfully from a mere brute to

become homo sapiens, a true human, it must be evi-

dent that he has done so by breaking away from

what was brutish in his nature and emphasizing,

cultivating, developing the incipient and rudimen-

tary elements in his constitution that tend to make

him a. man. We need no Christian revelation to
teach us that simple fact. It may be deduced from

logic and common sense. The better pagans knew it.

Even those who maintain in the face of facts that

man is in no essential distinct from the brute crea-

tion, should see the need of self-discipline. If you

give a brute beast all that he craves and free him

from all restraint, let him have his way in all things,

he will tear you to pieces. So, if you satisfy the



39SELF-DISCIPLINE

animal cravings of man, you will smother the spirit

and bring about a reversion of man through the

savage to the beast. There used to be in Darwin’s

day much talk about “The Ascent of Man”. But if

we in these days reject self-discipline, our descen-

dants will be writing of the Descent of Man. If we

let ourselves go, we shall most assuredly go down;

to release the inhibitions is to release the passions

and if we release the passions we shall ruin the race

and cancel the little civilization that has been

achieved slowly, painfully, and with so much self-

denial. Do as you please, live as you like, and in a

century or two we shall be Hottentots and Cannibals.

Civilization—what there is of it—is largely the pro-
duct of repression. Rousseau and Hobbes and Locke

understood that fact and it is the primary postulate

of Sigmund Freud. But they all insist that we have

paid a great price for civilization. They think we

suffer from the repression of our beastly instincts.

But some of us think that civilization is worth the

price. If there be those who prefer barbarism or

savagery or sheer animalism then they should know

that the shortest and swiftest way to achieve that

degeneracy is to “release the inhibitions.”

Indeed here and there in the midst of civilized

society there are men and women who are in effect

already barbarians. A man may wear broadcloth
and fine linen, feast sumptuously every day and have

the outward manner of a gentleman, and yet be in-

wardly a true savage. A woman may be most expen-
sively and exquisitely gowned, she may have the

manner of a queen and the grace of a Greek goddess

and yet be at heart only a beautiful barbarian. It

isn’t clothes, or the cut and quality of them that

makes civilization, it isn’t the complexion or the



40 THE LIFE OF THE SOUL

lingo or the geographical location that makes bar-

barism. Men and women who pamper the flesh and

are slaves to passion, even though they belong to the

very inner circles of culture, are essentially bar-

barians. The mark of the barbarian is self-indul-

gence: the sine qua non of civilization is self-re-

straint.

Yes, self-restraint, self-control, makes the civili-

zed human being
;
but one thing more is required to

make the perfect man. When he has subjected pas-

sion to reason, he must subordinate both passion and

reason to God. Then and only then does man fill his

rightful place in creation. For man is no mere ani-

mal. Man is not even merely man. Man is a child

of God; he does not and cannot be his whole self

unless in him the rational conquers the animal and

both the animal and the rational acknowledge their

subjection to the Divine.



TEMPTATION 41

TEMPTATION

Address delivered on November 29, 1936

The most interesting and important fact in the

history of any human soul, the most thrilling dra-

matic and indeed too often tragic fact is the fact of

temptation.

All life is conflict; when there is no conflict life

has ceased. It is in accordance with a law of our

nature, therefore, that any kind of conflict thrills us,

a footrace, a ski-jumping contest, a football match,

a prizefight, a duel of gladiators to the death, a

battle of airplanes high in the sky ; celestial “navies”

as Tennyson called them, “navies battling in the

central blue,” while armies in trenches and citizens

on house-tops watch with a mingling of fascination

and fear. Any kind of conflict stirs our blood, even

the conflict of brute beasts, a bull fight, a dog fight,

that extraordinary battle we have seen in a motion

picture between a mongoose and a cobra, or that be-

tween a water-buffalo and a tiger somewhere in the

jungle of Malay. Yes, we seem to have been born to

fight: it is in our blood. But as we rise out of sav-

agery to civilization we grow away from the

cruder kind of conflict, that of brawn and blood;

our fight becomes the inward, spiritual struggle

that we call temptation. Beasts fight one another,

savages fight one another. So they remain beasts

and savages. But civilized man fights himself and

fighting himself he makes himself man.

Temptation is the only really momentous event

in human life. For after all what does it matter

whether Artaphernes or Miltiades wins at Mara-

thon; Caesar or Pompey at Pharsalia; Wellington



42 THE LIFE OF THE SOUL

or Napoleon at Waterloo? What does it matter? Only

one thing matters, the victory of the soul over the

world, the flesh, and the devil. In the one case only

Europe or Asia is at stake ; in the other the outcome

is heaven or hell. “He that ruleth his spirit is

better than he that taketh cities”, says King Solo-

mon. Cities? Yes, continents! worlds! Alexander

conquered two worlds, the east and the west, but his

passions conquered him. Caesar was the most con-

sistent victor of his day, or perhaps of any day, but

he was a victim of the basest vices. So we write

Alexander and Caesar down as tragic failures—

a

preposterous judgment perhaps to the irreligious,

but not to those who have a sense of spiritual values.

Warfare is the worst of evils not because it sends

so many men out of the world, but because it sends

so many souls unprepared before the Judgment Seat.

After all it matters not much how swiftly or pre-

maturely we go or in what agony, if we go prepared

for our eternal destiny. Even the worldly-wise

should understand that. Do they not say it is better

for a man to die a hero at twenty than to linger on a

slave, a coward, a failure, to be a hundred ?

Temptation is not only a fact: it is a bewildering

mystery. But it is better to deal with fact and let the

mystery go. Some querulous low-spirited persons

ask, “Why did God make me so? Why does He not
save me in spite of myself? Why did He create me
with the possibility of my everlasting ruin?” When
Jesus said to Peter, “Satan hath desired to have

thee,” Peter might have cried out “Lord, slay

Satan!” But Satan the tempter (Satan is Hebrew

for adversary, persecutor, tempter), Satan is never

slain. The tempter and the temptation remain till

our last breath. Why? Shall we say “Why” in the



TEMPTATION 43

face of God? Shall we demand that God explain

Himself? Justify, vindicate Himself? Is man too a

God that he should interrogate God? “Shall the clay

say to the potter, ‘Why hast Thou made me so’?” We

have no right and no power to snatch the secret

from the mind of God. We don’t know the why

and the wherefore of temptation. But we can guess,

for we have a hint in the Book of Job. We read in

that superb epic, that masterpiece of literature and

of philosophy, “The Lord said to Satan : ‘Hast thou

considered my servant Job, that there is none like

him in the earth, a simple and upright man, and

fearing God, and avoiding evil ?’ ” As if He should

say “Satan, there is a man. Try your mettle upon

him. He will be a match for you.” Perhaps God is

like us (we are made to His image and likeness, so

God must be like us) and so, perhaps He enjoys the

sight of conflict. Therefore He points to Job and

says to Satan “Have at him!” And presently Job,

like that other valiant fighter, St. Paul, learns that

“our wrestling is not against flesh and blood; but

against principalities and powers, against the rulers

of the world of this darkness, against the spirits of

wickedness in the high places.”

But conflict with demons is chiefly for the elect,

champions, heroes, saints. They can grapple with

the same adversary who tempted Christ Himself.

As for those of us whom God cannot trust to con-
quer Satan, He asks us merely to subdue our own

flesh and blood. Even that is no child’s play. In fact

that most valiant gladiator of the spiritual life, St.

Paul after an agonizing experience with what seems

to have been carnal temptation, cries out “I see an-

other law in my members fighting against the law of
my mind. . . Unhappy man that I am, who shall



44 THE LIFE OF THE SOUL

deliver me from the body of this death?” Another

giant of the spiritual life, St. Augustine, had the

same struggle, even more bitter and much more pro-

longed. The history of it is written with superlative

eloquence in his Confessions. One of the best edi-

tors of that immortal masterpiece bids us notice:

“In the first place there tvas a moral struggle. That

is the great fact of the book. Augustine went down

into the very depths and came face to face with the

dragon that dwells there, with the facts of the sen-

sual nature in their barbarous simplicity. . . He

was an intensely human man, strongly sensuous

and keenly intelligent. The whole of his nature was

at war. Reason could not control, desire would not

obey.”

The story of his struggle and his triumph is a

classic as great as Shakespeare’s Hamlet or Macbeth

or King Lear, and of course more real. As a psycho-

logical revelation it is second only, if it be second, to

the Epistles of St. Paul.

There is perhaps another reason why God per-

mits temptation. It makes life intense, vivid, dra-

matic, life that otherwise would be dull and drab,

fiat, stale and unprofitable. All adventurers, ex-

plorers, conquerors have felt the need of something

in life to stir the blood, to quicken the spirit, to keep

aflame the tragic sense of life. The idea is in the

Ulysses of Tennyson, as indeed in all literature (it is

all literature). Ulysses grows weary of sitting “by

this still hearth, among these barren crags” as king

of

“a savage race

That hoard and sleep and feed.”

So he fares forth on his travels and adventures,



TEMPTATION 45

and though he confesses that he is not the man he

used to be, nor are his companions, yet

. . .“That which we are, we are

;

One equal temper of heroic hearts

. . .strong in will

To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.”

That spirit of adventure is the spirit in which one

goes forth to do battle with temptation. And yet

one does not “go forth” ; one needs not go forth. One

goes down into the heart, down into the depths of the

soul. On a battle ground seen only by God and His

angels the conflict wages, the outcome of which is of

infinite and eternal importance. Surely there is

drama in that, drama that is too often tragedy. Mor-

al failure is tragedy. And the very possibility of

failure, irreparable failure, makes the conflict no

less than momentous.

I beg you to note that when I speak of the

inward struggle, I do not mean merely the struggle

of the spirit against the flesh. Even if the soul con-

quers the body, dominates the unruly passions, sub-

dues the beast in man to the degree that its roaring

becomes only an occasional gentle murmur, still

temptation persists, only shifting its ground. When

mind has conquered flesh, mind must conquer

mind. St. Augustine, past master in the psychology

of temptation, says, “Mind commands body and there

is obedience; mind commands mind and there is re-

bellion.” The most crucial experience of the soul is

when its spiritual faculties engage in battle between

themselves, the mind against the will, or even more

agonizing, the will fighting the will in the one same

man. This is the battle that tears the very heart to

ribbons.



46 THE LIFE OF THE SOUL

Now some there are, or may be, to whom all this

sounds melodramatic, overemphatic, hysterical.

They say they know not what can be the meaning

of all these “heroics”; they cannot surmise what St.

Paul and St. Augustine were speaking of. As for

their own spiritual life it is serene, placid, unruffled.

There are no hurricanes and typhoons in their

hearts, they are unaware of any monsters lurking

in the deep caverns of their souls. In fact they

know of no deep caverns in the soul. For them all is

on the surface, and all thereon is sweetness and sun-

shine. I know not whether to congratulate such

souls as these or to commiserate them. If they have

had their battle, if it is over and done, if as the poet

says

“Like the Catholic man [they have] mightily won

God out of knowledge, good out of pain

Sight out of blindness and purity out of stain”,

Sight out of blindness and purity out of stain”,

if they have come out of conflict into abiding interior

peace; and if all their struggles are so far in the

past as to be quite forgotten, let them thank God

—

but watch and beware

!

If on the other hand they have not now and

never have had any profound, shattering, blasting,

terrifying soul-experiences, I confess I know not

what to make of them. Such immunity would seem

to be the prerogative of angels rather than of men,

the lot of the blessed in heaven rather than of mili-

tant humans here below. To most men it would seem

that to any one with red blood in his arteries, an

easily irritated nervous system, a vivid imagination

and a sensitive moral constitution, temptation is in-



TEMPTATION 47

evitable. Inevitable and, if I may say so, desirable,

first as an evidence of one’s being wholly human, and

secondly as a means for winning heaven and not

having it thrown at one as a gift.

The interior battle is not the only battle. The

outside world around about us swarms with our

enemies, knowingly or inadvertently doing their

worst to drag us down. The world is one vast con-

spiracy against virtue. “The whole world,” says St.

John, “is seated in iniquity.” On the right hand and

on the left countless millions of our fellow men are

as they say “taking the world as they find it”, en-

joying it without let or hindrance, strangers to all

scruples of conscience. They have an elastic stand-

ard of virtue, they preach and they practice the doc-

trine of compromise, a via media inmorals; “Be good,

but not too good”, ne quid nimis; as the French lady

said Catholique mais pas fanatique. In place of an

ethical system they hold to a few brief axioms, such

as “Whatever is, is right”, “What the millions do

cannot be wrong”, “God will not damn a multitude”

;

they ridicule what they are pleased to call “Puritan-

ism”, they cannot tolerate what seems to them ex-

tremism; in a word, the sum of their philosophy is

“We are in the world, let us take what it has to

offer.” Dum vivimus vivamus. What they really
mean is that sin—what we call sin—is not tragic
but incidental, unavoidable, nothing to worry about

;

it has not and cannot have everlasting consequences

;

and as for temptation which we take so seriously,

they quote with a wry smile one of Oscar Wilde’s

epigrams, “The easiest way to conquer temptation

is to yield to it”.

Now we meet these people day after day, walk
with them, talk with them, eat and drink with them,



48 THE LIFE OF THE SOUL

buy from them, sell to them, take our pleasures

—

most of our pleasures—side by side with them ; and
yet by our Christian profession we are bound to

loathe and repudiate—not them, but their view of
life. For the spirit that animates them is the spirit

of the world, and, says our Lord, “if the world hate

you, know ye that it hath hated me before you”;

and St. James, “Whosoever therefore will be a

friend of the world, becometh an enemy of God”.

However, the story of temptation is not all

tragic, it is in many cases triumphant. “One of the

greatest sensations of life,” says Dr. MacLaren.

“follows a temptation resisted and overcome. The

victorious knight of God when he has passed

through the ordeal is led to the end of the arena

where unseen hands loosen his heavy helmet, strip

off his blood stained armor and hold the cup of sac-

ramental wine to his lips.”

If I may pursue that excellent thought of the

Scotch dominie, there is no great glory to God, no

particular joy in heaven, when one who has had no

spiritual combat comes creeping quietly into heaven.

But when a warrior of the moral life, victor in many

a furious fight, draws nigh to the heavenly king-

dom, the angels on the ramparts shout to the keep-

ers of the gates “Lift up your gates, O ye princes,

and be ye lifted up, O eternal gates”, for if it be not

now the King of Glory Himself who enters in, it is at

least a hero from the army of the King of Glory,

and all the streets of the heavenly Jerusalem re-

sound with acclamation. The conqueror approaches

the throne, makes his obeisance, and rises to re-

ceive from his Lord and Master, Jesus Christ, the

kiss of Everlasting Peace.



SIN 49

SIN

Address delivered on December 6, 1936

In the first talk of this series I had occasion to

refer to the preposterous theory that religion was

invented by priests. I use the word “preposterous”

not loosely as a big word with a kind of smashing

sound, not even in its secondary sense as “irration-

al,” “foolish,” “nonsensical,” “ridiculous”, but in

its primary and most exact sense. A statement is

preposterous if it puts first what should be last or

last what should be first; if, as we say colloquially,

it puts the cart before the horse. Now the truth is

not that priests created religion, but that religion

created priests. Those who say that priests pro-

duced the universal and everlasting phenomenon of

religion do us too much honor. We are not God.
Only God can make something out of nothing.

Religion now and always is a vast and wonderful

reality, and to attribute it to priestcraft would be

quite as absurd as to say that an architect could

build the pyramids or the Parthenon, or the Taj

Mahal, or the whole vast assemblage of the sky-

scrapers of New York out of big chunks of blue

sky. Priests and prophets and patriarchs have the

same relation to religion that architects have to

buildings; they must have something to work on.

You cannot make temples and domes, mosques and

minarets, cathedrals and skyscrapers out of airy

nothing. Neither can you construct religion in the

heart of man unless the materials are there before

you commence to work. So! religion came first;

priests came second. To say that priests came be-

fore religion is preposterous.



50 THE LIFE OF THE SOUL

Now today, coming1 to the subject “Sin,” I must

first get rid of the equally preposterous notion that

the concept of sin is a product of priestcraft. There

always was and there is now in all men in whom

natural instinct has not been perverted or uprooted

a consciousness of right and wrong. When a man

does right he is at peace with himself
;
when he does

wrong he feels remorse, a sentiment quite different

from any other human emotion. A man born blind
does not blame himself. He may blame his parents,

he may curse his fate, he may blaspheme God; but

he doesn’t find fault with himself for being blind.

But he does find fault with himself if he does what

he knows to be wrong. You may tell him he is a fool,

an ignoramus, a superstitious lout; you may quote

him some very learned philosophers who say there

fs no right and no wrong; you may remind him of

certain modern religions and up-to-the-moment psy-

chologies that deny the fact of sin. But you don’t

really deceive him, even though he would like to be

deceived. He may not know “B” from a bull’s foot,

or a hawk from a handsaw, but he knows that bad

is not good, and wrong is not right. And by the

same token, he knows the difference between a sin

and an accident or a misfortune. Only if you twist

him and turn him round and round in the maze of

some complicated, new-fangled psychological sys-

tem
;
only if you bewilder him with a fantastic phil-

osophy, will you rid him of his conviction that sin

is sin and that if he commits sin he is guilty. You

may din into his ears “There is no sin, there is no

sin !”, but unless you hypnotize him and paralyze his

reason, he will answer “No sin? Then no good, no

bad, no right, no wrong. Black is white. Night is

day. And the devil is God
!”



SIN 51

It has been said that every sin begins with a lie.

Satan lied to Adam and Eve: “You shall be as

gods”; and from that day to this a lie seems to be

involved in every form of sin. The diplomat, about

to launch a war, prepares the way with “propa-

ganda,” that is to say with a deliberate campaign

of plausible lying. The “malefactor of great wealth”

cheats the government, cheats his competitors,

cheats the public, cheats his partners, cheats his own

soul; and what is cheating but a form of lying? The

profligate, as a preliminary to the seduction of an

innocent girl, lies to her, and lies again, tangles her

up in a network of lies, criss-crosses her with lies as

with the strands of a spider’s web.

But suffice it to quote, in support of the idea that

all sin involves lying, our Savior Who said “Satan is

a liar and the father of liars.”

Now the first Satanic lie is that sin makes us

happy. In the long history of the human race no one

ever achieved happiness by sin. Pleasure? Momen-

tary satisfaction? Yes, as in the case of carnal sin.

But the pleasure flees swiftly and pain ensues.

“Every man is tempted by his own concupiscence,”

says St. James, “being drawn away and allured.

Then when concupiscence hath conceived, it bringeth

forth sin. But sin, when it is completed, begetteth

death.” Outside the Scriptures there is the testi-

mony of one who spoke out of his heart, out of his

life: “I was beloved. I attained my wish, the bond-

age of clandestine fruition, and proudly riveted

round myself the chain of woe
;
then was I scourged

with the red hot iron rods of jealousy, suspicion,

fears, angers and quarrels,” And he cries out “0

my God, with what gall Thou didst embitter that

cup of sweetness!” The passage is from the book



52 THE LIFE OF THE SOUL

called The Confessions of St. Augustine, but it

might equally well be entitled the Confessions of

Every Man. Those who sin against the Sixth Com-

mandment commence with what they call in their

delusion “love”; they proceed to dislike, disgust,

hatred, sometimes even to murder or suicide or

both. The cup of sin is drugged, not with a soporific,

but with poison. Disease is in that cup, and anguish

and death. As with carnal sin, so with avarice,

ambition, greed. Sin lures the soul only to mock at

it. Sin is the Dead Sea Apple that flatters the eye

but in the mouth is dust and ashes.

All this is not the pietistic imagining of a sancti-

monious parson. You may read it in a masterpiece

of literature that contains the essential experience

of one of the most worldly men that ever lived,

Goethe’s Faust. The theme of that philosophical

poem is that the devil is a trickster and a liar.

Mephistopheles who is Satan, the embodiment of

Sin, promises Faust joy in the seduction and pos-

session of Marguerite. The sin completed, he laughs

at Faust, stabs his victim’s soul with anguish upon

anguish, and in the end crushes him with the reali-

zation of his responsibility for the drowning of Mar-

guerite’s child, the murder of her brother, and her

own madness and death. Those who don’t read the

Sacred Scriptures, the supreme human document

from which all literature has been borrowed, may

perhaps accept from Augustine or from Goethe what

they disdain to learn from St. James, or St. Paul, or

from Jesus Christ.

For those to whom Faust is known only as a

classic, too philosophical and too formidable a ve-

hicle for the conveyance of human experience, there

is in Tom Moore’s “Lalla Rookh” (a facile, lilting,



SIN 53

swift-running piece of verse) the episode of the

Veiled Prophet of Khorassan. This “prophet”, per-

haps legendary, perhaps historical, perhaps a com-

bination of both, was a rebel, an impostor, a charla-

tan. He claimed to have been in previous incarna-

tions Adam, Noe, Abraham, Moses. For his last

appearance upon earth he assumed the name of

Hakim ben Allah, Hakim Son of God; and as such

he demanded divine worship. He wore habitually a

veil of silver gauze to prevent, as he said, the

beauty and the shining glory of his face from blind-

ing those who looked upon him. As Tom Moore

puts it:

.... “O’er his features hung

The veil, the silver veil, which he had flung

In mercy there, to hide from mortal sight

His dazzling brow, till man could bear its light.”

He entices into his harem the beautiful virgin

Zuleika, promising entrance into Paradise as the

reward of her submission. Being defeated in battle,

he leaps into a vat of corrosive poison, but not

until he has unveiled himself, showing a face

“maimed and monstrous,” unnaturally and diabo-

lically hideous. He cries

:

“
‘Here—judge if hell, with all its power to
damn,

Can add one curse to the foul thing I am.’

He raised the veil; the maid turned slowly

round.

Look’d at him, shrieked, and sunk upon the

ground.”

The Veiled Prophet of Khorassan like Mephisto-

pheles is a symbolic figure of Sin. Sin is a rebel



54 THE LIFE OF THE SOUL

against God, an impostor, a magician. Veiled, it is

thought to be beautiful. It promises joy, it allures,

entrances, captivates. In the end it unveils and is

found hideous as hell.

The Race has been sinning now for several

thousands of years; men and women with endless

pathetic repetition have tried every sin known to

nature, and, exhausting nature, have invented sins

revolting to nature. Kings and other lordly sybarites

have offered rich rewards—as Herod said, even
“half of my kingdom”—to those who could devise
new sins or new methods of extracting pleasure

from old sins. But no man has ever found, except

for the briefest and most tantalizing moment, what

he sought in sin. Sin is Illusion. “Wine is a

mocker” says the wise man. Yes and lust is a mock-

er; illgotten wealth is a mocker, and power and

empire and fame and all that violates Goodness and

Truth and Justice and Purity.

Furthermore sin is slavery. The sinner declares,

in fact to impress others and to reassure himself he

vociferates, “Am I not free? May I not do with
my freedom what I will? Stand aside Priest and
Preacher! Out of my way, Father, Mother, Wife,
Friend ! My will is my own. Yes, and what you call
my soul, that too is my own. And shall I not do
what I will with my own? If there is misery ahead,
it will be my misery. If there is a hell, it will be my
hell. Leave me alone. I will go my way. I am
free

!”

Boldly spoken ! It smacks of the heroic. The

poor fool probably imagines it sounds magnificent,

like something in a play of Shakespeare or of Sopho-

cles. He fancies himself Brutus or Coriolanus or

Oedipus Rex.



SIN 55

But of course it is only rodomontade. Man is, in

a sense, “free” to defy God, just as he is free to stick

a dagger into his heart or shoot a bullet into his

brain. But it’s a mad kind of freedom, and if when

he cries “I am free,” he means “I have a right,” he

is worse than mad, he is blasphemous. No one has a

right to do wrong. Right—ultimately and basically
—Right is God. There can be no right to violate
God.

However, that is by the way. The more impor-

tant question is, what happens to that sinner, that

blatant violent advocate of freedom? We need no
Bible to answer that question, no literature whatso-

ever, no St. Augustine, no Faust, no Veiled Prophet

of Khorassan. All we need is experience, the testi-

mony of our eyes and our ears, perhaps, sad to say,

the testimony of our own hearts. He who sins in

the name of freedom, becomes a slave. Sin is

slavery, worse than that of the captives of the

Pharaohs in Egypt or of Nabuchodonosor in Baby-

lon. Epictetus the philosopher, though a slave, was

one of the freest men that ever lived. There were

gyves upon his wrists and ankles, but none upon his

mind and soul. Christ as He stood before Pilate

was bound but He was no slave. The slave was the

man on the throne, the man who thought himself

free. “Knowest Thou not,” said Pontius Pilate, “that

I have power to kill Thee and power to set Thee

free?” But Pilate had no power to set himself free,

or having the power could not, would not exercise it.

He could lift a finger and his legionaries would

slaughter the mob howling in the courtyard of the

pretorium, but he could not kill the demons in his

own heart.

A man is free when his soul is free. He is a



56 THE LIFE OF THE SOUL

slave when his will is in chains. The day comes

when the sinner wishes to be free. The adulterer

wishes he could send his consort to some far corner

of this world, or even into the other world. The

“crimes of passion” of which we read every day in

the newspapers are due to the fact that only murder

can free the sinner, and then he is not free. The

man who has accumulated wealth unjustly longs to

be free of the sting of his conscience. He would give

away his treasures, burn them up, drop them into

the sea. But no, there’s the wife, the sons and daugh-

ters in college
;
there is social standing, prestige, and

what he calls cynically his “reputation.” So he goes

on to the end. “The rich man died and was buried in

hell,” says Jesus, in the parable of Dives and Lazar-

us. He was buried in hell because his riches didn’t

belong to him and he couldn’t get rid of them.

Sin is not only folly and slavery. To the Chris-

tian, sin is treachery. We who believe in God and
Christ and yet commit sin are not rebels. We are
not decent enough to be rebels. We are slimy trait-

ors like Judas. We call Jesus Lord and Master; we
sit at table with Him

;
we tell Him we love Him. But

as He said at the Last Supper, “he that dippeth his

hand with me in the dish, he shall betray me”; “he

that eateth bread with me, shall lift up his heel

against me”. When He said “Judas dost thou betray

the Son of Man with a kiss?”, He spoke not alone to

the treacherous apostle but to all of us who make

acts of faith in Him, protest in prayer that we love

Him and would die for Him, but none the less take

part with those who crucify Him. “He that sinneth

crucifieth the Son of God.”

Sin is violence done to God. Sin if it could would



SIN 57

obliterate God. Good is God. Sin is the negation of

Good and of God.

It takes a philosopher, perhaps a mystic, to un-

derstand that Truth and Beauty and Good and

Purity are God. Not many men are philosophers;

still fewer are mystics. For the generality of man-

kind there is need of a visible, dramatic, spectacular

demonstration of the fact that sin is the murder of

God. Hence the crucifixion at Jerusalem, at the cross-

roads of the world, the focal point where east meets

west, at a moment when men from every nation

under heaven were gathered. Parthians and Medes

and Elamites, inhabitants of Mesopotamia, Judea

and Cappadocia, Pontus and Asia, Phrygia and

Pamphylia, Egypt—and strangers of Rome, Jews
and proselytes, Cretes and Arabians—all were at the
pretorium of Pilate, all saw the Victim of Sin mark-

ing His footprints in blood along the Via Dolorosa.

as He went to be crucified at Calvary. Over the

Cross of Christ the Son of God there was an inscrip-

tion Jesus Nazarenus, Rex Judaeorum, Jesus of

Nazareth, King of the Jews. But for those who had

eyes to see, there was another inscription written

not by the hand of man but by God : “Peccatum Hoc

Fecit,” “Sin hath done this.”



58 THE LIFE OF THE SOUL

THE PRESENCE OF GOD

Address delivered on December 13, 1936

“The Presence of God” is a fascinating topic, but

not easy to treat in a free and familiar style. I can-

not promise to make this discourse entertaining, but

I shall do my best to get along without philosophical

and theological words. And I confess at the outset

that there is a certain class of persons to whom I am

not equipped to speak. They are the dilettanti who

affect an interest in the spiritual life because there

is in them a strain of the sentimental which they

mistake for piety. They are not really devotees in

the original true sense of the word. They are rather

sippers and tasters. To them religion is a pastime, a

recreation, a temporary enthusiasm, an antidote to

ennui.

To such as these I do not address myself today.

For we come today to a subject that is not honey-

sweet and cannot be sipped on the wing. We face
the difficult but important question: How shall we
realize the Presence of God?

First let us avoid the mistake of expecting too

much. Our God is a hidden God. Unlike the idols of

the heathen He cannot be seen, touched, handled—

I

had almost said handled as children and certain

adults of delayed mentality fondle a doll, perhaps we

may say a holy doll. Our God is invisible, intangible.

Not that He hides Himself capriciously, provoking-

ly, though sometimes when we are baffled in our at-

tempt to see Him or imagine Him, we are tempted
to cry out “0 God, my God, stand forth

;
and let Thy

humble worshippers look upon Thee; draw the veil

that conceals Thy countenance from these mortal



THE PRESENCE OF GOD 59

eyes.” But no! there comes no apparition. There

cannot be an apparition of God as He is. A symbol?

A sign? Yes perhaps, on occasion. The burning

bush, the pillar of cloud by day and fire by night.

But the bush, the cloud, the fire is not God, any more

than a spoken word is the man who speaks it. “No

man hath seen God at any time,” says the Scrip-

ture. God is a Spirit and these eyes of ours cannot

see Spirit. They cannot even see the more tenuous

forms of matter. The air in which we live and

move and have our being we never see, still less

can our eyes discern and separate from one another

the component parts of the atmosphere, oxygen,

hydrogen, nitrogen. We are resigned to the fact
that the atmosphere is by its very nature invisible.

We must likewise be resigned to the fact that God
by His very nature is invisible. We live by Faith and
not by sight. We see now through a glass darkly.
When this mortal hath put on immortality, then

shall we see God face to face.

Sometimes indeed, in a moment of spiritual ex-

altation when there is deep silence in the heart,

when as St. Augustine has said “the tumult of the

flesh is hushed; hushed the shadows of earth, sea,

sky
;
hushed the heavens and the soul itself so that it

passes beyond itself and thinks not of itself; when

all dreams are hushed and all sensuous revela-

tions, and every tongue and every symbol”; then it

has happened that favored souls have heard God

speak “not by any fleshly tongue nor by an angel’s

voice, nor in the thunder nor in any similitude but in

His own Voice without any intermediary at all; they

reach out and with one flash of thought touch the

Eternal Wisdom”. * Augustine and his mother en-

* Confessions of St. Augustine, Book IX, Chap. X, adapted.



60 THE LIFE OF THE SOUL

joyed that mystical moment, but it was only for a

moment. And he says “Suppose this endured, and

all far inferior modes of vision were taken away and

this alone were to ravish the beholder, and absorb

him and plunge him in mystic joy, might not eternal

life be like this moment of comprehension. . .? Is

not this the meaning of ‘Enter thou into the joy of

thy Lord’ ?
”

Such supernal experiences are not necessarily

imagination, hallucination, hysteria. No one has

the right to call them delusion because they have not

happened in his own life, any more than he would

be warranted in denying the fourth dimension be-

cause he can see and understand only three. The

tyro in mathematics confesses that when Ein-

stein, Millikan, and others speak of the fourth

dimension they are beyond his depth. So, the tyro

in psychology should be willing to admit that when

William James and Hugo Munsterberg speak of

“the hidden powers of men” they have something

real in mind. Not that I mean to say that by the dis-

covery of certain undetected psychical forces, and

the deliberate cultivation of them, man can learn to

pierce the barrier between this world and the other

and see God. No, that way lies madness; they who

promise supernatural visions as a reward of asceti-

cal exercises or the repetition of some abracadabra,

are charlatans. At their door may justly be laid the

responsibility for much religious insanity.

On the other hand I must not be understood to

say that Catholics who practise assiduously what we

call “the spiritual life,” are forbidden to long for, to

desire, to encourage something akin to the mystical

vision of God. Saintly persons with a view of cleans-

ing the heart of all earthly dross undergo a rigor-



THE PRESENCE OF GOD 61

ous penitential discipline; they shut their eyes and

ears to all sights and sounds that stain the soul or

distract the mind from the contemplation of the

divine; they learn after prolonged practice to pray

not with words or even with thoughts but by fixing

the gaze of the soul upon God; they achieve what is

called in our theology “natural” contemplation (as

distinguished from the purely supernatural or

miraculous which is a free gift of God). They culti-

vate solitude; in deep silence—a silence like that of
which St. Augustine speaks, silence not merely of

the lips but silence of the emotions and of the mind

—

they place themselves in a receptive attitude and

we have reason to believe that upon occasion their

souls have been enthralled and the beating of their

hearts all but stopped by an intense realization of

the Presence of God. It lasts perhaps but a moment.

They are quickly back to earth again and they say,

with a modification of the words of Jacob. “Indeed

the Lord is in this place—and I knew it.”
Sometimes even those of us who are habitually

engulfed in an atmosphere of worldly activities, if

we can but steal away and be alone in some solitude,

deep in a dense wood, on a lonely mountain peak
;
or

perhaps hidden away unsuspected in the very point

of the prow of a liner in mid-ocean, gazing in the

dead of the night all round about upon the deep, or

up into the heavens, fixedly and with rapt attention

as if we would pierce the fathomless depths of the

sea or penetrate to the heart of the stars and steal

their secret; sometimes I say we may feel, or imag-

ine that we feel, the nearness of God. We reach out
our hands as if to touch Him with our fingers’ tips

;

we try to silence even the soft murmur of the blood

in our veins in the expectation of hearing some



62 THE LIFE OF THE SOUL

gentlest whisper of the Divine Voice. After such an

experience we may have such faith in its reality that

not all the skeptics and cynics in the world can shake

our confidence. How should they know? How should

any man know? “Who knoweth the mind of a man

save the spirit of the man that is in him?” “Secre-

tum meum mihi”, “my secret is mine own”. And

who but a rash and sacrilegious intruder can claim

to probe into the depths of my consciousness and

expose what he is pleased to call my “delusion”? The

man who pretends to read the hearts of other men

probably has never looked deeply into his own. If he

had, he would know that in the heart of every man

lies impenetrable mystery. The human heart is only

less incomprehensible than the nature of God, and

what happens in the depth of the heart of one man

is not to be rashly, still less scornfully, judged by

another man. And if for one fleeting moment God

has deigned to lift a corner of the veil that hides His

Being from my mortal eyes, how insufferable must

be the impertinence of some stranger to my soul if

he claims to know that God has not come to me and

that my being startled and enthralled by a realiza-

tion of His Presence was only a superstition

!

If after what seems to have been a heavenly visi-

tation a man’s life is so deeply changed, his char-

acter so divinely transformed, his spirit so subdued

and chastened, his heart so humbled that those who

know him best, shall we say in particular his father

confessor or spiritual director, are compelled to say

“This is the change of the right hand of the Most

High”, and if this spiritual betterment persists, I

think we have a right to believe that the mystical ex-

perience was authentic.

However, all that is casual. What we seek is a



THE PRESENCE OF GOD 63

more nearly permanent realization of the Presence

of God. To this end we may do well to consider what

saints and philosophers have said of the nature of

God’s Presence. God, they explain, is both transcen-

dent and immanent. Formidable words! But we

have in one of our most familiar hymns a beautiful

and understandable translation of those big words

into little ones : “Out beyond the shining of the far-

thest star, Thou art ever dwelling infinitely far.”

That is the transcendence of God. And now the

Immanence : “Yet the hearts of children hold what

worlds cannot.” By His Nature God is as far above

our minds as the stars in the sky and the infinite

spaces beyond the stars are high above our heads.

And yet God is as near to us as the heart that beats

within our breasts, the blood in our veins, the breath

in our lungs. “Closer art Thou than breathing,

nearer than hands or feet.” Or to quote the classic

utterance of St. Paul to the Athenians, God is “not

far from every one of us, for in Him we live and

move and have our being”.

Some thirty years ago when “Modernism” (in-

accurately so-called) burst upon the theological

world, a celebrated clergyman narrated with

gusto his discovery that God is immanent. I

wondered at the time if he had never read

St. Paul. “Immanent” is only a philosophical word

for “abiding within”. Had the clergyman spent the

greater part of his life ignorant of the primary

truth of the indwelling of the Holy Spirit?

Poets and religious writers have tried to express

by means of simile and metaphor, what philosophers

and theologians find it so difficult to convey in ab-

stract terms. In fact St. Paul quotes to the Athe-



64 THE LIFE OF THE SOUL

nians one of their own poets. Perhaps poetic or

imaginative language will help us too. Well then : we

are in God as the fish is in the sea and the bird in

the air. God is our element, indispensable to our

life. In Him we live; out of Him we die. We say
God is Life-Giver. That is true but only partly true.

La, vraie verite as the French say, the true truth is

that God is not Life-Giver but that God is Life. Out

of that Life we cannot live. The fish cannot live in

the air, the bird cannot fly in a vacuum. Man can-

not live out of Life. Life is God.

Again: we are in God as light is in the atmos-

phere. At high noon all the world is flooded with the

light of the sun. We cannot tell which is air and
which the light. The light is in the air and the air

is in the light. With equal intimacy we are in God

and God is in us. But as the axiom says, “Every

comparison is lame.” You may take away the light

of the atmosphere and the atmosphere remains: but

if you take away the Light of Life, Life passes away

with it. To speak more correctly still, God is Light

and God is Life. When God goes (if God could go)

Light and Life would go with Him. Men deny God,

but they couldn’t even deny God if there were no

God. The denial of God affirms God. I could neither

affirm nor deny, I could neither think nor speak, and

you who listen could neither hear nor judge, out of

God. Out of God, do I say? There is no such place

as “Out-of-God.” Even if a man could lock himself

in some projectile and shoot himself through the air

and into empty space he would still be in God. When

we say that God is “everywhere” we mean that He is

even in empty space. “Whither shall I go from thy

spirit?” cries the Psalmist “or whither shall I flee

from thy face? If I ascend into heaven, thou art



THE PRESENCE OF GOD 65

there : if I descend into hell, thou art present. If I

take my wings early in the morning, and dwell in

the uttermost parts of the sea : even there also shall

thy hand lead me: and thy right hand shall hold

me. And I said: Perhaps darkness shall cover me:

and night shall be my light in my pleasures. But

darkness shall not be dark to thee and night shall be

light as the day : the darkness thereof, and the light

thereof are alike to thee.”

At the time when that bit of superb poetry was

written—3000 years ago—men had little knowledge
of the actual nature of physical reality. Their anal-

ogies were taken from the sun, the moon, the stars,

day and night, light and darkness. But with modern

science came the theory of a substance called the

ether, supposed to penetrate and permeate earth

and sea and sky. In this medium radio waves, as

some explain, pass with the speed of light even

through mountains of granite. Correct or incorrect

from the point of view of most recent physical sci-

ence, the ether may be taken as another symbol of

God. St. Bernard says Deus non adest sed inest,

“God is not present to the world, He is present in

it;” or as an ancient poet has put it: “Cleave the

wood and thou shalt find Me; raise the stone and

there am I.” God does not hover or brood like a
cloud about a mountain. The whole Being of God

pierces and penetrates the mountain. Yes, and every

grain of sand or stone in the mountain. Yes, and

every molecule and atom in the most microscopic

particle of that sand and stone. God is about and

above and within all things that are in the heavens

or on the earth and in the water upon the earth. He
is wrapped in the convolutions of the brain of man

;

He is woven and interwoven in every fibre and sinew



66 THE LIFE OF THE SOUL

of the human frame; He is in the body more inti-

mately than its own very soul.

One more simile : that of the iron and the fire. A

bar of iron is plunged into a furnace of fire. The

iron presently takes on the nature of the fire; the

fire penetrates the iron, is fused into the iron so

deeply that the eye cannot detect which is fire and

which is iron. Curiously, St. Teresa says that in a

certain exalted mystical state her soul seemed so

swallowed up in God that she could not tell which

was her soul and which was God. But in truth God

is so fused with our soul, not merely in some mys-

tical state but here, now, on this earth, in this room,

in your room, that the two, the soul and God are,

to any eye except that of God Himself, indistin-

guishable and inseparable.

Often we say “God is at my fingers’ ends, on the

tip of my tongue, in my heart, in the blood stream,

in the bone and in the marrow of the bone.” But He

is in reality closer than all these. Our whole being,

body and soul, is swallowed up in the Absolute

Being which is God. We are steeped in God, satura-
ted with God. We are as close to God as the dye in
the wool, as the color in the rose.

But let us give over the attempt to imagine or to

describe the indwelling of God in the universe and

in the human soul. And let us close with a practical

application of a truth that we cannot entirely com-

prehend. Why not? Do we not make constant use of

that mysterious force, or substance, or whatever it

may be, that we call electricity, without knowing

what it is? Well then, practising the Presence of

God without being able to grasp it entirely, let us in

prayer not lift up our eyes to the heavens as if God

were there and not here. Let us not attempt to fling



THE PRESENCE OF GOD 67

our voice to distant Arcturus or Betelgeuse, or even

to some presumable black empty space beyond the

remotest star. Remember St. Paul, “God is not far

from every one of us.” Remember St. Augustine

who says in his Soliloquies, “I was wandering like a

lost sheep, searching outside of myself for that

which was within. I ran through all the streets and

squares of this great city, the world, searching for

Thee, 0 my God, and I found Thee not, because I
sought Thee wrongly. Thou wert within me and I

sought Thee without, Thou wert near me and I

sought afar off”. *

A realization that God is near, so near that not
even the nearness of the light to the air, of the blaz-

ing iron to the fire, or the soul to the body, can serve

as an apt comparison—this realization will trans-
form the spiritual life from dull dreary duty to ec-

static joy. To know and to feel that God is closer

than breathing, nearer than hands and feet, is to

possess even on this earth some faint foreshadowing

of the bliss of heaven.

Soliloquies, c. XXXI.



68 THE LIFE OF THE SOUL

THE DESTINY OF THE SOUL: HEAVEN

Address delivered on December 20, 1936

The Christian creed is a series of magnificent

affirmations. Much modern philosophy on the other

hand consists largely of questions, doubts, contradic-

tions, denials. The difference is vastly significant.

Christ reveals, Anti-christ denies. Satan is defined

“the spirit who denies”. Worse still perhaps is the

attitude of the agnostic who denies that he denies.

“I neither affirm nor deny,” he says. But not to

affirm is in effect to deny. If a man refuses to affirm

that there is a God, he may as well deny that there

is a God. If he dares not say that he has a soul, he is

as one who has no soul. If confronted with the vital

question of life after death he wavers and says “Per-

haps ! perhaps not !” he confesses the futility of his

philosophy and indeed the insufficiency of all philos-

ophy. Philosophy is thought
;
religion is life. We can-

not live life on a “perhaps”. Chesterton has said “The

human mind is an instrument for arriving at con-

clusions; if it reaches no conclusions, something is

wrong with the instrument.” The primary purpose

of the human mind is to understand life. If it fails

in its first function, it is as they say of so many

things in Soviet Russia, “Kapoot”, out of order,

broken down. In the slang of our own country there

is an expression: “He doesn’t know what it is all

about.” The phrase carries the imputation of in-

efficiency, incompetence, stupidity. Yet there are

philosophers who proclaim with much satisfaction

that they don’t know what life means, what we are

doing on this earth, whence we come or whither we

go. They have not advanced beyond the Persian



THE DESTINY OF THE SOUL: HEAVEN 69

philosopher poet of the twelfth century, Omar

Khayyam, who sums up the agnostic creed in a quat-

rain:

“Into this universe, and why not knowing,

Nor whence, like water willy-nilly flowing;

And out of it, as wind along the waste

I know not whither, willy-nilly blowing.”

Modern agnostics glory in this creed of nescience,

that is to say in the admission of complete mental

frustration. If the human race were to accept that

negative creed we should all go mad like prisoners

confined in a deep dungeon with no ray of light and

not even an inkling of the reason for their incar-

ceration.

But our Master Philosopher, Jesus Christ, speaks

with no “ifs” and “ans”. He reveals, declares, pro-

claims, “For this was I born, and for this came I

into the world; that I should give testimony to the

truth. . . I am the way, and the truth, and the life.”

St. Paul in the midst of the philosophers on the Are-

opagus—degenerate logic-choppers not wise enough
to recognize that the glory of Socrates and Plato and

Aristotle had departed—declares boldly “I found an
altar also, on which was written To the unknown

God. What therefore you worship without knowing

it, that I preach to you”—an echo of what Jesus had
said to the Pharisees, “You have not known him, but

I know him”.

So in our catechism questions and ans-

wers come clear, sharp, sure as a rifle shot and its

echo. “W
T

ho made you?” “God!” “What is man?”

“A creature composed of body and soul.” “Why did
God make you?” “To know Him and love Him and



70 THE LIFE OF THE SOUL.

serve Him in this world, and to be happy with Him

forever in the next.”

Now, the previous discourses in this series were,

in a way, an exposition of the duty of serving and

loving God. Today, by your leave, we come to con-

sider the consequence of the love and the service of

God—eternal happiness, heaven.
Remaining in the mood of affirmation, I shall not

argue, or debate, or prove or demonstrate; I shall

simply declare. Not—most assuredly—not in my
own name. Who am I that I should assume omni-

science and infallibility? If I had only my own wis-

dom to rely upon I should be silent, for shame. The

Catholic priest challenged for the evidence of the

tremendous truth of life after death does not say “It

seems to me”, or “my opinion is,” or “according to

my philosophy.” No, but “Thus sayeth the Lord.”

When God speaks man must say “Amen
!”

“Credo
!”

Now concerning the resurrection of the dead:

we have from the mouth of Jesus not a guess, a hope,

a surmise, but a magnificent compelling proclama-

tion. Martha, sister to Lazarus, at her brother’s

grave says to Jesus: “Lord, if thou hadst been here,

my brother had not died. Jesus saith to her: Thy
brother shall rise again. Martha saith to him: I

know that he shall rise again, in the resurrection at

the last day. Jesus said to her: I am the resurrec-

tion and the life: he that believeth in me, although

he be dead, shall live: And every one that liveth,

and believeth in me, shall not die for ever. Believest

thou this? She saith to him: Yea, Lord, I have be-

lieved that thou art Christ the Son of the living God,

who art come into this world.”

That passage is a classic of literature and of re-

ligion. It is also one of the magnificent affirmations



THE DESTINY OF THE SOUL: HEAVEN 71

of which I have spoken ; no reasoning, no doubt, no

suspicion of hesitancy, no condescension to the diffi-

culty of the doctrine, but a declaration, majestic as a

pronouncement from Sinai.

By contrast perhaps I may quote—though some
may feel it almost sacrilegious to do so—a passage
from the notorious modern agnostic, Robert E.

Ingersoll, who was, as all my hearers must know, a

violent and scornful antagonist of revealed religion.

Endowed by his Maker with unusual eloquence, he

used it to scoff at the Church, the Bible, the Creed,

the entire Christian tradition. But on the occasion

of the burial of a beloved brother he pronounced a

eulogy in which occurs this passage:

“Life is a narrow vale between the cold and

barren peaks of two eternities. We strive in vain to

look beyond the heights. We cry aloud, and the only

answer is the echo of a wailing cry. From the voice-

less lips of the unreplying dead there comes no

word
;
but in the night of death hope sees a star and

listening love can hear the rustle of a wing. He who

sleeps here, when dying, mistaking the approach of

death for the return of health, whispered with his

latest breath, ‘I am better now.’ Let us believe, in

spite of doubts and dogmas and tears and fears that

these dear words are true of all the countless dead.”

Now mark the difference between the agnostic
who has no basis for his belief but his own intui-

tions, and the Christian who relies upon the author-

ity of the Son of God. When a Catholic priest stands

at an open grave, he repeats not a carefully pre-

pared oratorical discourse of his own—it would be
an intrusion and a profanation to speak mere human

words at so sacred a moment—but the words of
Jesus to Martha at the tomb of Lazarus : “I am the



72 HE LIFE OF THE SOUL

resurrection and the life
;
he that believeth in me, al-

though he be dead, shall live: and every one who

liveth, and believeth in me, shall not die forever.”

Reassured by that divine proclamation, the priest

prays: “May the Angels lead thee into Paradise;

may the martyrs receive thee at thy coming, and

take thee to Jerusalem the holy city. May the choirs

of the angels receive thee and mayest thou, with the

once poor Lazarus, have rest everlasting.”

St. Paul, undaunted by the skepticism of

his day concerning life beyond the grave,

faces the question squarely and answers not with

argument but once again with bold triumphant affir-

mation. In fact he flings in the face of heathen and

of weak-kneed Christians what amounts to a chal-

lenge: “Now if Christ be preached, that he arose

again from the dead, how do some among you say

that there is no resurrection of the dead? But if

there be no resurrection of the dead, then Christ is

not risen again. And if Christ be not risen again,

then is our preaching vain, and your faith is also

vain. Yea, and we are found false witnesses of God:

because we have given testimony against God, that

he hath raised up Christ; whom he hath not raised

up if the dead rise not again. For if the dead rise

not again, neither is Christ risen again. . . If in

this life only we have hope in Christ, we are of all

men most miserable. But now Christ is risen from

the dead. . .”

In the days of Christ, skepticism had invaded

even the priestly caste, the sect of Sadducees. They

denied or doubted the future life. But doing so they

had forgotten their own Bible. A thousand years
before Jesus the patriarch Job declared “I know

that my Redeemer liveth, and in the last day I shall



THE DESTINY OF THE SOUL: HEAVEN 73

rise out of the earth. And I shall be clothed again

with my skin, and in my flesh I shall see my God.”

As a counterpart and explanation of that precise

and specific prophecy we need the words of St. Paul

—now here again is a classic text: “Flesh and blood
cannot possess the kingdom of God: neither shall

corruption possess incorruption. Behold, I tell you a

mystery. We shall all indeed rise again : but we shall
not all be changed. In a moment, in the twinkling of

an eye, at the last trumpet: for the trumpet shall

sound, and the dead shall rise again incorruptible:

and we shall be changed. For this corruptible must

put on incorruption; and this mortal must put on

immortality. And when this mortal hath put on

immortality, then shall come to pass the saying that

is written: Dearth is swallowed up in victory. 0

death, where is thy victory? O death, where is thy

sting ?”

I think that will suffice as evidence of what I

have called so often the magnificent affirmations of

the Christian religion concerning the continuation

of human life beyond the grave.

If any one demands to know what that life shall

be like, we do not pretend to be able to say. St. Paul

quotes the prophet Isaias: “Eye hath not seen, nor

ear heard, neither hath it entered into the heart of

man, what things God hath prepared for them that

love Him.” A mole burrowing in the ground cannot
imagine the life of an eagle soaring above the moun-

tain tops
;
a miner, if there be any such, born, living,

working, dying a thousand feet below the

surface of the earth is only bewildered if you expa-

tiate to him upon green trees, flowers in the mead-

ows, running brooks, fruit orchards, mountain peaks

and the starlit sky; he knows not what you say, his



74 THE LIFE OF THE SOUL

eye hath not seen, his ear hath not heard, it hath not

entered his mind to conceive it. The unborn child

hidden in the darkness of its mother’s womb cannot

know the freedom, the breadth, the sweep of life,

life physical, intellectual, social, such as we experi-

ence. And we in turn, living on this earth, this

prison, this deep dark mine, this narrow womb of

mortal life, cannot conceive the kind of life enjoyed

by those who dwell in heaven.

All we can do is to make some kind of picture of

eternal life by negating the disadvantages of this

life. In this life we labor and are weary, in that

life we shall have rest
;
in this life we see in part and

know in part, in that life we shall know even as we

are known; in this life we are forever at war, war

with ourselves and with all about us : in that life we

shall have peace. One of the prayers of the Mass

speaks of heaven as locus refrigerii lucis et pads,

a place of rest and light and peace. In another

prayer the Church speaks of this life as a “vale of

tears”; but in that life, says the Apocalypse “God

shall wipe away all tears from their eyes : and death

shall be no more, nor mourning, nor crying, nor sor-

row shall be any more, for the former things are

passed away”. Also in the Salve Regina, the “Hail

Holy Queen”—one of the most beautiful and touch-
ing of all prayers—we are called “exules filii Hevae”
“exiled children of Eve”, and indeed the word

“exile” best describes our state. We are not at home
here, we are strangers in a strange land : we lament

with the children of Israel carried captive into a

heathen land, “Upon the rivers of Babylon, there we

sat and wept; when we remembered Sion: On the

willows in the midst thereof we hung up our instru-

ments. For there they that led us into captivity re-



THE DESTINY OF THE SOUL: HEAVEN 75

quired of us the words of songs. And they that car-

ried us away, said: Sing ye to us a hymn of the

songs of Sion. How shall we sing the song of the

Lord in a strange land? If I forget thee, 0 Jerusa-

lem, let my right hand be forgotten. Let my tongue

cleave to my jaws, if I do not remember thee: if I
make not Jerusalem the beginning of my joy.” Upon
that exquisite brief lyric poem we Christians, carry-

ing further the thought of our Jewish forbears, have

composed a hymn: “Jerusalem, my happy home,
when shall I come to thee? When shall my sorrows
have an end? Thy joys when shall I see?”

Indeed the notion of exile runs through much

of our hymnody and a great deal of our liturgy.

When we arrive at the heavenly city—please God

—

we shall experience the joy of the weary, famished,

thirst-ridden and all but despondent wayfarer across

some burning desert, some Death Valley, when his

eye falls upon green groves, his ear catches the

tinkle of rippling streams, and he knows, this time

he knows, that it is no mirage but reality, the Ulti-

mate Reality, the Enduring Reality, Paradise and

God.

If any one should say that we only delude our-

selves with a fancy that on a day our exile shall be

ended, that there is no green grass, there are no

trees laden with fruit and streams tumbling down

in a riot of joy from resplendent mountain peaks

beyond the end of the desert, if any one should laugh

and mock at us because we believe in heaven after
earth as the wayfarer believes in green groves

beyond the yellow sand, we can only retort to him
that he not only contradicts the deepest and surest

vaticinations of the heart of man and that he is
therefore inhuman, but that he gives the lie to God,



76 THE LIFE OF THE SOUL

and that therein he blasphemes. To contradict the

human race and to disagree with God is a bold pro-

cedure on the part of any man who admits in the

next breath that he has no evidence but what he

manufactures within the narrow walls of his own

skull. If we do not rise from the dead, we who be-

lieve that we shall are truly the most miserable of

men: but so too is all mankind miserable. In that

case, life has no meaning, virtue no recompense, vice

no punishment. If there be no heaven, this earth is

hell.

But, as I have said, we who believe in God and

in Jesus Christ as the Word of God do not argue

about eternal life. We declare it, proclaim it, and
in doing so we stand not only with God and Christ,

but with the whole race of man. Regardless of those

who with the characteristic Pharisiasm of intellec-

tuals trust in themselves as wiser than the rest of

men, doubt or deny the word of God, reject the in-

tuitions of the human soul, and mock at the hunger

and thirst for eternal happiness in every human

heart; we unfurl the banner of our faith full in the

face of death. We shout our battle cry, Christus
Vivit, Christ liveth; and our proclamation, the last

of our magnificent affirmations. Listen to it: “We

would not have you ignorant, brethren, concerning

them that are asleep, that you be not sorrowful,

even as others who have no hope. For if we believe

that Jesus died, and rose again: even so them who

have slept through Jesus will God bring with him.

For this we say unto you in the word of the Lord,

that we who are alive, who remain unto the coming

of the Lord shall not prevent them who have slept.

For the Lord himself shall come down from heaven

with commandment, and with the voice of an arch-



THE DESTINY OF THE SOUL: HEAVEN 77

angel, and with the trumpet of God: and the dead

who are in Christ, shall rise first. Then we who are

alive, who are left, shall be taken up together with

them in the clouds to meet Christ, into the air, and

so shall we be always with the Lord. Wherefore,

comfort ye one another with these words.”



78 THE LIFE OF THE SOUL

CHRISTMAS

Address delivered on December 27, 1936

Glory to the new-born King ! The familiar salu-

tation is from one of our popular hymns; it is sung

with gusto by millions of devout Christians during

the Christmas season. But I wonder if none of those

who sing it or hear it will stop to ask “Why do we

call Him King ?” Kings are not born in stables. At

their entrance into the world they are surrounded by

physicians and nurses and privileged noble atten-

dants. The solemn event of childbirth is supervised

by a master of ceremonies, the Lord High Chamber-

lain, with dozens of servants at his beck and nod so

that nothing may be left undone to make the

accouchement of the queen-mother easy and success-

ful.

But Mary, the mother of our new-born King, had

no servants to wait on her, except the little group

of awkward embarrassed shepherd folk, in from

the fields, who stood ready to help in their clumsy

way. There was no court physician, not even a mid-

wife, except perhaps some peasant woman, none too

skillful and none too clean of hand, who was sud-

denly pressed into service. As for milord Chamber-

lain, poor St. Joseph doubtless did his best to fill

that position.

All in all it was a queer way of welcoming a

king into the world, and a wretched place for a king

to be born in, a hole in the rock, a kind of cave

called by way of politeness a stable.

If you go to Versailles they show you a huge

palace, and in the palace a particularly gorgeous

room, its walls heavy with brocaded tapestries, and



CHRISTMAS 79

there on a stately four-poster bed, rich with silk

hangings, they explain that Marie Antoinette gave

birth to the children of the king. Now that’s some-

thing like a king’s birthplace—not a dingy cavern
reeking with the dirt of cows and sheep, and heated

only with the breath of the beasts.

Strange predicament also for a queen—taken
suddenly in travail, lying upon an impromptu bed of

straw snatched from the animals’ fodder for the

emergency; no grand four-poster bed, no bed at all,

not even a pallet; no silken curtains that could be

drawn to provide a merciful privacy. Was there

ever a Queen-Mother and a new-born King like

Mary and Jesus, before their time or since?

And the home in which they lived ! The King of

England has Buckingham Palace, and Windsor

Castle, and as if those two huge mansions were not

enough, there is Balmoral (meaning “majestic

dwelling”) over the border in Scotland; and I dare

say there are half a dozen other homes to which the

king can repair by way of varying the monotony of

regal life. But as for King Jesus, He lived for thirty

years in a wretched little cottage in the hills, not

much better than the grotto in which He was born.

It wasn’t even picturesque
;

there was nothing

pretty about the poverty of Mary and her Child.

Real kings and queens, it is true, sometimes

amuse themselves with a pretense of being poor

peasants. At the Petit Trianon Marie Antoinette

played the part of milkmaid. But it was only a mas-

querade, and when it was over she went back to the

palace, the court, and the gay life. But simplicity

and poverty were no game for Jesus, Mary, and

Joseph. The master of the humble home and his

foster Child were not play-acting at being carpen-



80 THE LIFE OF THE SOUL

ters, and their poverty was no masquerade. They

had no palace to which they might repair if they

got tired of the cottage.

When Jesus finally left that little hut in the

Galilean hills, He had no home whatever. It seems

to have been His custom to sleep on the ground with

only the olive trees above His head. For aught we

know He may not have been welcome even there. It

is possible that He was sometimes driven off like a

vagabond by the landlord on whose property He

had trespassed, as His mother had been driven away

from the inns on her crucial night in Bethlehem.

During all His public life He didn’t know where He

was to rest His head when night fell. He said so

Himself, “The foxes have holes, and the birds of

the air nests
;
but the Son of man hath not where to

lay his head.” Now kings don’t go roaming around

the countryside like that, sometimes having a meal

and a bed and at other times having none. If Jesus

was a king He certainly was the poorest king ever.

Stranger still, unlike most poor people, He had

no interest in wealth. In the land where He lived it

was customary for kings to exact tribute. But He

could not become interested in that custom. When

they showed Him the coin of the tribute, He asked

“Whose image is this?” “Caesar’s,” they said.

“Very well,” said He in fact, “let Caesar have it.”

If Jesus was a king, why didn’t He take that chance

to say so? He might at least have said, “Caesar’s

image is stamped on this coin, and he lays claim to

it, but by right it should be Mine. I am King of the

Jews.” But no, He showed infinite unconcern.

Money was nothing to Him. Did any one ever see,

did any one ever hear of such a king?

Besides money, kings have what goes with money



CHRISTMAS 81

—power. They have armies. If a king has no army,
or if, having an army, he is not sure of its loyalty, he

will not be king for long. The people understand

that. If the army deserts a king, the people laugh at

him, mock him, spit in his face. Yesterday he could

have had them whipped for a syllable of irreverence.

Today they shout ribaldry in his ears. Yesterday he

could have ordered their heads chopped off, today

they put his head on the block. Yes, the army makes

the king, and when the army quits him, he is done

for.

Jesus had an army indeed, a ragtag and bob-tail

army, poverty stricken people traipsing after Him,

hoping He might work some magic with a few loaves

of bread and give them all something to eat; unfor-

tunate women who, somehow retaining woman’s

most characteristic gift, intuition, could see that this

man was not like other men; sick people, lame and

halt and blind, lepers emboldened to come out from

the rocks and the tombs
;
yes, He had an army, some-

times as many as five thousand who seemed to have

nothing better to do than to tramp after Him. But,

of course, when trouble came, and the big men com-

menced to close in on Him, the poor nondescript

army of Jesus just naturally melted away. “He

looked for some one to have pity on him, and there

was no man,” the prophet had said. Jesus looked

for some one to stand by Him and there was no man.
How then did He ever come to be called King? Did
they use the word to mock Him, and if so, why do
we keep up the mockery? Why not drop the very
memory of that travesty upon kingship.

Kings, furthermore, are fond of pomp. They

have forerunners to clear the way for them. When a
king rides forth through the town his gendarmes



82 THE LIFE OF THE SOUL

search every home along the route beforehand. They

prepare the way before him and make it safe. When-

ever and wherever he appears there is a fanfare of

trumpets, and when he passes, bugles blow and there

is grand excitement.

But poor King Jesus had no retinue, no guard; if

He passed through the narrow streets of Jerusalem,

or any other Palestinian town, He had to jostle His

way through the crowd, like any other insignificant

poor man. And the last time He made His way

through those mean, filthy little streets there cer-

tainly was no one to clear the way for Him. He

stumbled and fell, and there was no one to rush to

Him and help Him to His feet.

So, all in ail—not to continue the contrasts—it
does seem absurd to refer to Jesus Christ as a king.

There could never have been any one less kingly.

Then why indeed, do we call Him King? There

can be only one answer: He called Himself King.

More than that—much more. As that precious little
volume, Ecce Homo, says, Christ “laid claim, per-

sistently and with the calmness of complete convic-

tion to a dominion more transcendent, more uni-

versal, more complete than the most delirious votary

of glory ever aspired to in his dreams.” Sir John

Seelye, who wrote that eloquent sentence, had an

immense admiration for Christ the Man, but could

not see that He is God. Coming from such a one the

statement is perhaps even more remarkable than if

it had been written by an orthodox believer. God of

course could carve out a kingdom for Himself by

sheer miraculous power. But how could a mere

man, and such a poor, helpless man as Jesus of

Nazareth, achieve a transcendent and universal

kingdom? The Gospels are packed thick with ano-



CHRISTMAS 83

malies and paradoxes, but this is the maddest of all

—that the poor, helpless, unsupported Nazarene
peasant should aspire to be King of Kings and Lord

of Lords.

Not the least puzzling question in connection

with this amazing ambition (if we may so speak) is,

How did Christ ever happen to conceive it? Solo-

mon never had such a vision of universal empire.

At its greatest extent the Hebrew kingdom was only

about 60 miles in width, and a little more than 200

in length. Immediately upon Solomon’s death that

small kingdom was broken in two, and by the days

of Christ it was in four parts, one Roman Province

under Pontius Pilate and three other tetrarchies

under Herod, Philip, and Lysanias. As for Jesus,

He knew by experience only the stretch of land be-

tween Nazareth and Jerusalem, a mere matter of

some sixty miles. He had indeed been carried as a

new-born babe into Egypt, but He had been carried

back again before He was two years old. So natural-

ly He knew nothing of the land of the Pharaohs.

Acquainted only with the narrow limits of Palestine,

how could He have so much as imagined the empire

of the Caesars ? And, after all, what was the extent

of that empire? Scarcely wider from east to west

than from New York to Denver, and not longer
north and south than from Boston to Charleston, it

reached scarcely one-twelfth of the way around the
world in one direction, and not one-twentieth in the

other. Even so, a Galilean peasant could no more

visualize the length and breadth of the Roman Em-
pire than a modern peasant in, let us say, Czecho-

slovakia can appreciate the size of the United States.

Yet Jesus quietly commanded that His Kingdom
should be proclaimed throughout the whole world to



84 THE LIFE OF THE SOUL

every creature; and He predicted that heaven and

earth should pass away before His universal king-

dom should come to an end.

I say it is astounding that this vision of universal

domination could have existed even as an idea in the

mind of Christ. But the infinitely more amazing

truth is that it actually has become an accomplished

fact. It is a familiar statement that the Cross of

Christ has been carried into lands that never saw

the Roman Eagle. But that is a miserable under-

statement. The real fact is that the reign of Christ

reaches to the ends of a world of whose size not even

Alexander or Julius Caesar could have had any

imagination. True, the reign of Christ is not totally

undisturbed and undisputed. But it is incomparably

more firm than any earthly kingdom or empire that

has ever existed. However imperfect the dominance

of Jesus may be, no one will deny that there are at

this moment some hundreds of millions of men and

women who would endure any kind of martyrdom,

mental or physical, rather than renounce allegiance

to Christ, their King.

And, more remarkable still, they give their alle-

giance to an Invisible King, “dead and gone” as men

say, these nineteen centuries. I have drawn some

contrasts between Christ and other kings, but the

superlative contrast remains: when a king dies his

reign is over. “The king is dead. Long live the

king.” No one gives allegiance to a dead king. No

one now trembles at the name of Herod. No one

offers incense before the statue of Caesar. And as

for the Pharaohs, who preceded the Caesars, they

are dug up out of their tombs only to be exhibited as

curiosities in a museum. They are not otherwise of

interest to the multitude.



CHRISTMAS 86

But Jesus is a different kind of King. There

must be today some five hundred millions who name

themselves proudly “Christians,” bend the knee to

Him and call Him Lord and Master. And beyond

these there are surely other hundreds of millions

who venerate His memory. His doctrine and His

Person are honored by the Buddhists, of whom there

are some two hundred and fifty millions. Even Mo-

hammedans call Him a saint and place Him as it

were in their calendar. Atheists, agnostics, and

other unbelievers are careful to explain that they

dislike Christianity only because it has in their opin-

ion, fallen away from its first fervor and has lost the

pristine purity it enjoyed when it came fresh from

Galilee. The blasphemer Nietzsche, who had rever-

ence for almost nothing and for no one, complained

that there has been only one Christian, the One who

died on the Cross at Calvary. That bitter jibe is one

to which we make no retort. We are content to have
Jesus respected even if at the same moment we are

despised. “He must increase, and I must diminish,”

said John the Baptist. St. Paul added that he was

content to be ignored if only Christ reigned in the

hearts of his hearers, and all we lesser Christians

subscribe to the sentiment of St. John the Baptist

and St. Paul.

And so, with Christians, Buddhists, Mohamme-

dans, and the more dispassionate, fair-minded Jews,

as well as unbelievers of all sorts and degrees, giv-

ing honor to Christ our King, nineteen hundred

years after His death, we feel that His vision of uni-

versal domination is fairly well realized.

Pere Lagrange, in his introduction to the Gospel

of St. Luke, has this interesting bit of historical in-

formation : In the year 9 before Christ, the Roman



86 THE LIFE OF THE SOUL

proconsul Paulus Fabius Maximus published in the

principal cities of Asia Minor a remarkable docu-

ment addressed to the Greeks, in which he pro-

posed that they should commence the year with the

birthday of Augustus Caesar. “The day” (so runs

the incredible pronouncement) “has given another

aspect to the entire world, which would have been

close to ruin if Caesar the delight of the human race

had not been born. Therefore, every man may with

justice consider that event as the beginning of his

life and of his existence. From that day forward one

has no reason to regret being born. No other day

could have been a happier occasion for society and

for the individual than that of the birth of Augustus

Caesar.”

And the Greeks made this reply: “The Divine

Providence which rules the course of our life has

given proof of his interest in us and his goodness,

and has provided for us the greatest boon of our life

in giving us so virtuous an emperor to be the bene-

factor of all mankind. Not only has Augustus Caes-

ar surpassed all preceding benefactors of the race,

but he leaves to posterity no hope of ever producing

his equal. The birthday of this god has been for the

world the beginning of all good.”

Once more the contrast: the king born in the

palace is forgotten, for who at this late date so much

as knows the birthday of Augustus Caesar? But the

birthday of the King Who was born in a stable is
kept as a holy day throughout the world, a world in

comparison with which the Roman Empire was only

a province.

So, after all, Christ is King : compared with Him

there has been and there shall be no other : an appro-



CHRISTMAS 87

priate theme, 1 think, for reflection at Christmas

time.



CARDINAL HAYES STATES AIMS
OF THE CATHOLIC HOUR

(Extract from his address at the inaugural program in the

studio of the National Broadcasting Company, New York

City, March 2, 1930.)

Our congratulations and our gratitude are extended to the

National Council of Catholic Men and its officials, and to all

who, by their financial support, have made it possible to use

this offer of the National Broadcasting Company. The heavy

expense of managing and financing a weekly program, its

musical numbers, its speakers, the subsequent answering of

inquiries, must be met. . . .

This radio hour is for all the people of the United States.

To our fellow-citizens, in this word of dedication, we wish to

express a cordial greeting and, indeed, congratulations. For

this radio hour is one of service to America, which certainly

will listen in interestedly, and even sympathetically, I am

sure, to the voice of the ancient Church with its historic

background of all the centuries of the Christian era, and

with its own notable contribution to the discovery, explora-

tion, foundation and growth of our glorious country. . . .

Thus to voice before a vast public the Catholic Church is

no light task. Our prayers will be with those who have that

task in hand. We feel certain that it will have both the
good will and the good wishes of the great majority of our

countrymen. Surely, there is no true lover of our Country

who does not eagerly hope for a less worldly, a less material,

and a more spiritual standard among our people.

With good will, with kindness and with Christ-like sympa-

thy for all, this work is inaugurated. So may it continue.

So may it be fulfilled. This word of dedication voices, there-

fore, the hope that this radio hour may serve to make known,

to explain with the charity of Christ, our faith, which we

love even as we love Christ Himself. May it serve to make

better understood that faith as it really is—a light revealing
the pathway to heaven: a strength, and a power divine

through Christ; pardoning our sins, elevating, consecrating

our common every-day duties and joys, bringing not only

justice but gladness and peace to our searching and ques^

tioning hearts.



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“Social Free-

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“Personal Freedom.” To be pub-
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Address: OUR SUNDAY VISITOR, Huntington, Indiana









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