The War of Man’s Passions
The Amphitheatres of the World
It is hard to tell what is the greatest delight of a small boy in a small town when a circus comes. Most would mention the acrobatic feats; many the curiosities; few if any would speak of what is not intended for a performance. Yet the feeding of the animals in the menagerie has a fascination which attracts the young, even while it repels. Perhaps it is not pleasure. Certainly it is nothing like the feeding which makes his eyes dance when flashing colors and whirling forms pass before him in endless succession. All that charms; the feeding of the animals has a fascination of horror which leaves upon him an indelible impression. He sees the huge blocks of raw meat thrown through black bars of iron to restless, pacing beasts. The bright-colored covers of these dens on wheels served only to make the fierce appetites of the animals within more horrible. A beautiful picture of some tropical glade would be slipped aside and behind rows of rigid iron the munching and growling and panting lions and tigers would tear their bluish chunks of flesh with teeth shining whiter out of the dripping blood.
Their Deceptive Show
Poor little fascinated and frightened boy! You thought that a horrible spectacle because you saw these animals as they really were, stripped of the colors and trappings of the show and seen for a moment in their true state. You were not able then to remove the gay coloring of the great show beside you. There was too much brilliancy; there were too many distractions of eye and ear, with blaring horns and glittering hues, to let your inexperience strip all this away and see the prison bars and know that other animals were being fed on ruddier, nobler flesh. Neither could you be expected to know that you had before you in that gilded den of the menagerie a picture of life, a picture of history!
The Amphitheatres of the Soul
The concupiscence of the flesh, the concupiscence of the eyes and the pride of life, they are the ravenous monsters of the world. Behind the splendor, beneath the rouge and tinsel of life lurk the passions of men. The Roman circus fed its animals with living beings and a debased mob watched the unnatural gorging with a savage exultation. In the larger amphitheatre of all time and upon choicer victims feed the fiercer animals, anger and gluttony and lust and greed. Their prey is not dead and decaying flesh; they grasp with talons and claws; they rend with beak and jaw even daintier morsels still. The food for the passions of men comes not from the slaughterhouse, but from the home. The concupiscence of the eyes, the concupiscence of the flesh, the pride of life greedily devour the souls of men.
The Bright Apparel of the Passions
The only way in which these enemies of man can effect their purpose is by concealment. To know them as they are and in their deadly effects is to hate them. Sin must come disguised, if it is to come at all. It must promise like the rose in the bud, not disappoint or disgust, as yesterday’s lush and decaying roses do. So the passions of men must come laden with promises. Their claws are wreathed in flowers, and their fetid breath is overcome with the languor of perfume. Art comes with all its charms to vest them. Sculpture gives them a fair stature and exquisitely molded form. Painting bathes them in light and touches them to grandeur with the tints of the rainbow. Music fashions melodious laughter for their lips and turns their speech into song. Dancing imparts to them the grace of movement, the varying suppleness of lithe limbs and the glow and lustre of life. The theatre and opera gather under one roof all the glory of all the arts, and with this united fascination and the glamour of suggestiveness and the Whetted curiosity of an acted story apparel them in their utmost gorgeousness. There is the amphitheatre of sin. Silken, purple awnings hide the conflict, but the victims are there nevertheless. The concupiscence of the eyes and the concupiscence of the flesh and the pride of life are rampant beneath this veil of art and glutting their ravenous jaws with souls of men behind all the pomp and pageantry.
The Attack upon the Heart
Every shock of those passions is felt in the heart. The eye responds to the color and shapes, the ear to the sounds, the taste to the savor, the nostrils to the scent, the touch to the warmth and softness. Each sense thrills with its own agitation; the heart quivers with them all. All the passions are registered in the heart. There they have pressed their teeth and thrust home their fangs and buried beak and claw. The heart of man is scarred with a thousand conflicts. Every movement of its red tide bears in upon it perhaps a new enemy. They come not with purpose to destroy; they come as if to console. They are sweet and musical and fragrant and variegated and soothing and gentle. Ah, but that is only the parade of the bright conveyances. Wait awhile and the gaudy doors will slip aside and display the bar and the beasts; wait awhile, and the heart will be once more tossed to the wolves and tigers!
The Heart – the Last Citadel
The end of the conflict is in the heart. The sin is not in the eye or ear or taste or touch; it is in the will. The sin is not in the body, but in the soul. The wildest agitations of the passions have at times shaken man’s tormented nerves and fibres until they were almost frenzied with the clamor for satisfaction, and not yet was sin and never shall be sin as long as the will stays true. It will be sin to expose sensitive nature to the seductiveness of passion; to cast ourselves into a whirlpool and expect with untried muscles to escape to the shore; to keep in front of a speeding train and strive to push it back; that would be suicide, and to do the like in moral things is suicide of the soul. Unhappily, passions do not wait until the heart comes to them; they often come to the heart of their own accord; but, however near they come, however baleful their glazed eyes, and however close their hot, sickening breath and dripping jaws, they cannot reach the heart. The black iron bars are there to keep them back. The will must do as the keeper does before the small boy’s fascinated gaze and must toss the heart to the beasts. What is the heart, then, which does not pass behind those black iron bars? It is the pure heart; the heart whose unclouded vision shall see God; the heart whose tongue shall fashion the new canticle, whose lips are stained with the wine which springs forth virgins, whose feet follow wherever the Lamb goes. It is the pure heart, too, from which Saint Paul says charity, the perfection of the Gospel, comes. “Now the end of the commandment is charity from a pure heart and a good conscience and an unfeigned faith.”
The Peace or Christ’s Purity
The Birth of His Purity
It is eminently fitting that Saint John should picture the Lamb of God upon Mount Sion surrounded by those who were “without spot before the throne of God.” The leader of that throng which had “His name and the name of His Father written on their foreheads,” the centre towards which the new canticle was sung, sung “as the noise of many waters and as the voice of great thunder and as the voice of harpers, harping on their harps,” the brightest star in that galaxy of purity, is and deserves to be the pure Heart of Christ. What care was taken by God that no blemish should come near that source and model of purity I A sinless virgin whose soul never for an instant passed under the shadow of sin, whose heart-blood never was kindled by the fever that is the curse of fallen man, she, the spotless one, was prepared by God to be the Mother of the Lord. Nothing was lacking in Heaven or upon earth when the time came for the first heart-beat of Christ. Through the coming of the Holy Spirit, under the overshadowing power of the Most High, the Second Person passed to earth. Infinite purity united Itself within immaculate virginity to the spotless nature created by the infinitely pure Spirit of Love. So the pure Heart of Christ began to beat among the stained children of the race of Adam and for their cleansing.
Brightness and Warmth of His Purity
The pure Heart of Christ! Pure indeed and flawless as crystal, but not hard; blanched indeed like the newly fallen, shining snow, but not cold; purged of all blemish and refined as a white hot flame, yet not consuming; such is the pure Heart of Christ, having all the beauty of every spotless thing in the universe with none of the defects that go with Its symbols. With all this divine purity there is associated no cold reserve, but only excessive attractiveness. Human hearts become stern; they harden a little in the face of a world which threatens their innocence by every avenue entering into man’s soul. Human hearts are wax in the blistering, pitiless heat of overpowering passions. They must ever be on their guard, they must be ever checking themselves and holding others in check, and so through prudence and chaste fear they surround themselves with a circumspection, somewhat cold but wisely careful. Not so with the pure Heart of Christ! With the lavish intimacy of the sunlight His love went everywhere and was as pure and unsullied when it made hearts like those of His Mother Mary and Saint John more resplendent, as when It fell upon the soiled hearts of sinners who had been trodden down into the mire. Christ touched them all with cleansing lustre and was untouched Himself. His Heart was as approachable and intimate as sunlight and yet infinitely more pure.
Kindness of His Purity
The world did not understand the Heart of Christ then, and it does not understand It now. Even His Apostles wondered at the approachableness of their Master. There is nothing to surprise us in this. The world looked on Christ as a man and does so now. So His purity is something far above man’s thoughts or imaginings; something beyond their own experience; something divine. Indeed the attitude of Christ towards the Samaritan woman and towards Magdalene is so unlike anything of His own time or before, and so strange to us even yet, that the very strangeness and newness of His conduct are enough almost of themselves to prove that Christ was God.
Sympathy of His Parity
Join to that intimate friendship the full knowledge of Christ, and the wonder increases. Some hearts are pure because they know not, because they see no evil in themselves and cannot imagine it in others. Christ knew all and saw all. Before His consciousness were the sins of man, not only those that have passed into history, but also every most secret thought or desire in all their shamelessness. Christ had knowledge of all. It is evident in Magdalene’s case when to the Pharisee’s “She is a sinner,” He made answer, “She is forgiven.” It is evident in the case of the Samaritan woman whose whole life lay open to Him. It is most of all evident in that scene which of itself is a proof of the divinity of Christ, the scene of the hypocritical accusers convicted and skulking away and of the forgiven sinner left alone and dismissed sinless. “Hath no man condemned thee?” And she said: “No man, Lord.” And Jesus, who knew her heart and came with His pure Heart to cleanse the hearts of mankind, said: “Neither will I condemn thee. Go, and now sin no more.” All these and many others, of whom the Gospels do not speak, came close to Christ, became His intimate friends and had their hearts made pure by His Heart. Only the Heart of God has acted and can act in that way.
Mercy of His Purity
Courage, then, hearts of mankind! Peace has come again after passion, and where ruin was and desolation, now once more is consoling prosperity. You have had to contend with the passions in their fascination and in their ferocity. Your hearts have been scene of battles, of some victories, perhaps of many defeats. You may now, it is likely, look back upon them to a time when all was peace therein, with greensward and ripening grain and flowers and a quiet homestead. You recall how the war came. With attractions at first to pique the curiosity and with color and music; an advance guard, a swiftly riding troop, a skirmish line, then buglers and the march of many feet. You shudder at the memory of what followed, when the storm burst and war was seen as it is: shouts and thunder and curses and blows, grass reddened with blood, flowers trampled into the mud, boundary lines blotted out, and the old home of your youth and innocence a blackened mass of smoking ruins. And then when the fight went by and left you in dark isolation, you thought that all was lost. But you forgot a more terrible defeat, where another Heart contended with passion; you forgot the more glorious victory, where defeat was changed to triumph; you forgot the pure Heart of Christ, which knows all and will welcome you and will let you come near to Him, nearer than before. The scene of defeat will become better than it was and will have fairer flowers and richer harvests and dearer homes than before. Love which has ruined the world saved it on Calvary. The love of the pure Heart of Christ put stouter and stronger bars between the hearts of mankind and their enemies, the wolf and the tiger.