By Henry Aloysius Barry
Says Emerson, "the sublime vision comes to the pure and simple soul in a clean and chaste body." Purify your will by disengaging the soul from lusts, from ambitions, avarice, sensuality, and you will become dreamers like Joseph. Says the philosopher: "There, are in the soul qualities which may be acquired by exercise and habit, as the body acquires certain powers and habits;— have you never noticed how quickly and clearly the small soul of the wicked grasps the things upon which it is bent, and what a power it acquires in so doing? It sees very plainly, only it chooses to direct its vision to the evil things. But take these same souls in infancy, cut away and prune all the growth of passion, akin to the flesh, and set them free from those heavy clods which cling to the pleasures of the table and other similar delights, take away that weight which drags the moral vision down to everything which is low, instantly that same soul, the eye set free, turns toward realities, and sees them as clearly as it now sees these things which absorb it."— Plato. Worldly men are then the real dreamers and spiritual men are dreamers of the real. "Where are the abstinences of St. Monica in regard to the sorceries of the earth? Who suspects the ecstasies of which our intemperance deprives us? Where are the souls ever new and growing, through their search after wisdom, from childhood unto death? And who suspects the floods of light and true love which would burst forth from the christian souls for the salvation and happiness of mankind, at the cost of a little effort?" (Pere Gratry.) Our Lord says: "For every one that doeth evil, hateth the light, that his works may not be reproved." (St. John iii, 20.) This studied evasion of light, this sterility of faith, then, or this absence, practically, of faith is the direct production of an undisciplined will, a will not yet surrendered to the empire of divine love. Correct the will, recast it, have love, and everything else will adjust itself. We will hear no more of compromise, of practicability, of common sense and of the other euphonious terms of a pusillanimous, selfish, indolent, but sleek and affected will suborned to bolster up its loose interpretation of the Gospel and give an air of consistency to its merely convenient code of daily-life canons of living. "Intellectual errors result from moral defects."
