By Henry Aloysius Barry
When wind is favorable to a steamship, it, too, makes use of the circumstance and spreads her canvas to steady herself, and again directly to quicken her pace by catching the gusts of wind. When the wind is against her, she pushes onward just the same in spite of it. Let us use piety, emotional, imaginational and sensitive when these help us, but at the same time strenuously defy them when they oppose us. The inward steam and electricity will accomplish all this. What mariner does not sigh for everything that will more swiftly waft him to his own land and the smiles of his loved ones? Yes, make all possible use of piety. A set purpose, however, is what makes man a vertebrate and not a jellyfish. It is the mainspring of the rational creature. To act without fixed purpose and determined resolution, built upon deep conviction and deep faith, is to drift, to dawdle, to be addle-pated, to have a hope that deceives. To tune our lives to moods like an artist, to be obsequious to one's impulses and emotions is to be animalistic, erratic and irrational. "Where there is not a sane faith," says St. Augustine, "there cannot be justice, because the just man liveth by faith." The triumph of virtue is over the flesh.
Emotion is one of the concupiscential brood. Mere piety or pietism throws about one's virtues a certain halo of picturesqueness; it imparts to one's asceticism a certain dash, lots of color, a dramatic setting, and renders it less somber, yet, who does not admire, to a greater extent, the undaunted, resolute firmness, that colossal majesty and overpowering, steadfast, latent strength of the religious man, whose life in dogged fixity of principle is independent of whatever physical tone or emotion, — a christian in sickness and in health, in honor and disesteem, in fulness and penury, in life and in death.
True liberty of the soul is found in independence of creature, emotion or sense. — "The spirit is willing but the flesh is weak." This is a true statement of affairs. To advance in spite of it is christian victory. Emotionality turns out pious people and, not infrequently, pietists, and perhaps it would be as well to say that there is a world of difference between the two things. Sound the inner soul, test the will and you shall encounter, contrary to appearance and pretence, the presence of foreign matter or vacuity—the virtue is not sane and healthy; it is veneered.
Womankind stands perhaps more in danger of insolidity owing to her temperamental make-up. The Church, you will observe, makes reference to the "devout female sex." Woman, more than man, is prone, in general, to filter the truths of life through a net-work of emotions. The trappings or embroidery of religion, its blazonry or leafage too much engage them, to the detriment of a better and solider fruitage of religion, namely, the interior qualities. Some persons are so dominated and enslaved by sensuousness that they are hospitable, demonstrative and Christ-like to their brethren on sunny days and the antithesis on days of gloomy weather. As a cause of the practice of virtue the sensitive offers insecure ground. When from the intensity of the inner force of our love for God the senses participate by redounding thereunto they refresh one. Here they are an effect and not a cause and therefore do not deceive. If we make of them a barometer they deceive likewise, because they do not record the state of the soul, they even belie the truth. Man is composite. Body and soul coalesce in a manner; the soul, however, must always grip the reins of government. There is a certain amount of human pleasure that, besides being the fruitage thereof, excites one to godliness. St. Augustine says, "The soul is drawn to God by love,—it is the same thing, if you are drawn by the will and pleasure. What does it mean to be drawn by pleasure? To take pleasure in the Lord. There is a certain pleasure of the heart, to which this heavenly food is sweet. Now if the poets could say that each one is drawn by his own pleasure, not by necessity, but pleasure, not by duty, but delight, how much the more forcibly ought one to say that man is drawn to Christ because he delights in the truth, takes pleasure in blessedness, takes delight injustice, in eternal life. Have the bodily senses their pleasures whilst the soul is barren of its delights? This human delight is, however, chiefly the effect of the action of the soul, a result of the love in the heart, the vehement yearning for God. Give me a lover," says the saint, "and he will understand what I say, give me one who thirsts, a pilgrim in the desert, burning for the founts of eternal love—give me such a one and he will understand what I am saying." It will be seen in these words that the human pleasure one experiences in religion is the fruitage of the soul. The root of this christian pleasure is in the soul not in the body. Of course it becomes in this way a cause of inner culture when the soul thus reminded of the sweet fruits is roused to a deeper conviction, a more resolute determination to do and dare for God and heaven. The sweet experience, the swift unveilings, the short glimpses of the divine Lover's sweet and majestic countenance, moves one to desire truth and justice more and more. Yes, make all the use possible out of these delightful transports. Find rest in them and refreshment, an incentive, but rule them; do not be their slave nor dependent upon them. The Holy Ghost has a distinct, personal character or individuality. God is the exemplar of all christian ideals. The Orders of the Church, whilst of kin as children of one family, have their own relative ideals, taken by the saints who founded them from the mind of God under the flatus of the Holy Ghost, in prayer and recollection.
The Dominican is such; he fulfils his ideal when he strictly conforms to the type of perfection portrayed in his institute. In so doing he reveals his Dominican personality and achieves his own end whilst he is enacting in the meantime his portion of the organic mechanism of the Church. The Jesuit has his ideal; the cultivation of his institute imparts to his mind, heart and manner a certain personality, wherein a certain feature is more prominent than we find it in another order, for example, a military obedience in its internal organism, blind, quick and heroic, with a tact, a polish and a solidity markedly dominant in its outward aspect. The Franciscan has his ideal. The cultivation of poverty to a marked degree, attended, of course, by the other usual religious requisites, stamps him with his own peculiar Assisian character or Franciscan personality. The priest has his ideal. Marked cleanliness of life, zeal for souls, a prophetic hatred of, and inveighing against, evil in the world. Yet, on the other hand, sympathy for the poor and sinful, the spirit, if not the letter, of detachment from temporal goods. A fatherly generosity, a hidden reserve, a priestly knowledge. This is his ideal; this imparts to his life the sacerdotal personality; this makes him different to other men. The father has his ideal. A severely correct deportment, blameless conduct, domesticity, leadership in government, circumspection of speech, vigilance, prudence, interest in his children's lives, both spiritual and temporal, a consciousness that the little ones will be one day what he himself is—good or bad, and in like proportion. These, however, are relative types of evangelical and christian perfection. Peculiar bonds or relations operate in the ideal. Independent, however, of all relativity, there is one deep bond, a mainspring, an elemental individuality, one essential cosmopolitan ideal that should be reflected by the life and conduct of every christian man of whatever sphere or rank or however high or low his aspirations might be. Truth and justice demand it, and God demands it; the heart demands it; our eternal health demands it. The pledges we made in baptism and which we so often renewed at missions, in daily examination of conscience, all demand it. It is that every christian should reflect Christ, should speak and do in as Christlike a manner as is possible for each one of us, with earnest, steadfast effort and endeavor, to be like the Master. Each one of us ought, in consistency, if our religion is not to be but a shallow and hollow mockery, to have a christian personality, a marked distinctiveness as against the deportment, character and personality of the mere pagan.
