THE MORAL LAW
rather serious difficulty confronts any decent person who attempts to speak on the two Commandment which concern us today, the Sixth and the Ninth. For the Sixth, as Catholics and Lutherans count it (otherwise the Seventh), is "Thou shalt not commit adultery"; and the Ninth (or part of the Tenth in the alternative enumeration) is "Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor's wife." Obviously these two commandments bring us face to face with the ugly sin of lust, lust in the flesh and lust in the mind, and no man who respects himself and his audience can approach that subject without misgivings. I shall therefore preface this talk with a prayer for you and for me, a prayer to Jesus, the lover of chastity, and to Mary, His sweet Virgin Mother, patroness of purity, that they may direct the course of my thoughts and the choice of my words, and that you and I may both remember from beginning to end that I am speaking and you are listening in the presence of the All Holy God.
That does not mean, however, that I must deliberately weaken my language. Christ Himself, though infinitely aloof from even the suspicion of coarseness of utterance, was a plain speaker. Those who imagine a mealy-mouthed Jesus do not know the Gospels. He was never one to mince words. Take for just one example this divine declaration from the tenth chapter of St. Mark, verse 11: "He said to them: whosoever shall put away his wife and marry another, commits adultery, and if the wife shall put away her husband and be married to another, she commits adultery."
That strong statement irritated some of His hearers, and to this day infuriates many. It is a "hard saying." But the Gospels are liberally sprinkled with hard sayings that came out of the mouth of the gentle Nazarene.
Following Christ, the apostles were plain-spoken men in regard to sins of impurity. St. Paul indeed said: "Let these things be not so much as mentioned among you," but evidently the warning is merely against prurient conversation, for in his Epistle to the Romans he himself detailed and exposed the sins of the pagan world with a straightforwardness that in these days would scandalize many a Christian congregation.
After Christ and St. Paul, the great preachers and writers of the early centuries, some of whom we distinguish with the name "Fathers of the Church," discussed "immorality" fearlessly and frankly, using without embarrassment those blunt Old Testament words of which we moderns seem to be ashamed. Their language was robust but never obscene, and I am inclined to think that if we were free nowadays to speak of sin as the Bible speaks of it, instead of using a, "nice Nellie" vocabulary, our morals would be healthier and more wholesome.
Furthermore, it does seem unfair that clergymen and other moralists should be commanded to speak softly about vice, while writers of fiction, of drama and of talking picture scenarios are free to use whatever vulgar or profane or obscene word they think will lend what they call a "punch" to their productions. If they are permitted strong words for an immoral purpose, why may we not counter with equally strong words for a moral purpose? Why must we be gagged while they are so loose-lipped? Why must we fight like a boxer with one broken fist that he cannot use?
But let us lament no more the unnatural restraint put upon us by hypocritical custom. And let us come to close grips with our subject. And first I address myself to those persons, particularly the young, who foolishly imagine that they can find happiness in sins of the flesh. Of course there is no happiness in sin, any kind of sin, and the sin of impurity is the surest way to misery. St. Augustine, in his marvelous little book, "The Confessions," tells of his own experience in words that are, like the words of the Bible, outspoken but not offensive. He says:
"I polluted the brook of friendship with the sewage of lust, and darkened its clear shining with smoke from hell. I plunged headlong into love whose fetters I longed to wear." But he cries out "O my God, My Merciful One, with what gall didst Thou embitter that cup of sweetness! For I was beloved; I attained my wish, the bondage 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, anger and quarrels."
It was well for Augustine that the results of his sin were not even more tragic. Sins of the flesh often result in suicide or murder. Charles Bigg in a beautiful introduction to his edition of the Confessions remarks: "Experience is always the same." He quotes from the Latin poet Lucretius: Medio de fonte leporum surgit amari aliquid. "Out of the midst of carnal delights something bitter emerges." And " Why," he asks "does this gall in the honey make one man a wet blanket, another fond of sensuous pleasure, while a third concludes that he has fixed his hopes too low and struggles on upward in quest of purer joys?" There indeed is a psychological and a theological puzzle, but we have just now no time for puzzles. What concerns us is the fact, demonstrated countless times since the days of Adam and Eve, that sin---especially the sin of impurity---is Dead Sea fruit, beautiful to the eye, but dust and ashes in the mouth.
Now here is the first reason, the first and poorest reason for the avoidance of impurity: Men and women plunge into it seeking happiness, and they achieve only anguish. There is evidently something in human nature, something angelic, something divine, that makes it impossible to find satisfaction in sins of the flesh. How this can be, on the theory of material evolution, so popular nowadays, the evolutionists never seem to explain. They keep telling us that man is only an animal, but they have no reply to the problem "Why then can he not take his pleasures like an animal and be content?" Disguise the loathsome fact with fine phrases as they do, the essence of their doctrine is that we are not only of the earth earthy, but that we are of the, beasts beastly. And at this moment (or, at least until very recently when both science and philosophy have taken a turn away from materialism) the theory of our kinship and our essential equality with the animals, the theory of evolution, seemed to be about to conquer. But it cannot be. You may tell man that he is only an animal and you may overwhelm him with what you are pleased to call proofs, biological, physiological, anatomical, ethnological and what not, but you don't really convince him; he knows that "a man's a man for a' that," and one of the reasons he knows is that when he lives like an animal he makes himself wretched.
Walt Whitman, said by some to be the one great American poet, writes somewhere that he likes animals because they don't weep over their sins. But that's why they are animals. Man is the odd animal that does weep over his sins, and perhaps that is the reason why, if he ever was a mere animal, he is a mere animal no longer. He is aware of sin, he is unhappy in sin, and there is no sin that tortures him more than the sin of animalism.
And here indeed is the great psychological and moral fact: man is ever at odds with himself. We love purity, we admire it, we desire it, some of us are vowed to it. And yet we are drawn with a fierce attraction and with what seems at times irresistible force toward impurity. St. Paul confessed that in spite of his having been exalted into the third heaven, where he saw things and heard things "not given to the tongue of man to utter," he suffered the sting of the flesh. He laments again and again that "the flesh lust against the spirit and the spirit against the flesh," and he cries "the evil which I will not, that I do, and the good which I will, that I do not ... I am delighted with the law of God, according to the inward man. But I see another law in my members, fighting against the law of my mind, and captivating me in the law of sin, that is in my members. Unhappy man that I am, who shall deliver me from the body of this death!"---Romans 7.
Every man who is a man knows that conflict and that anguish. Some persons may think that a good man is merely one who experiences no great temptations, and that a bad man is one who has been cursed by the inheritance of a particularly passionate nature. But they who imagine such things can never have read the lives of the saints. St. Paul and St. Augustine are not exceptions: they are rather the rule. They happened to be not only, saints but psychologists. They were experts in self-analysis and they had the gift of putting on paper the discoveries they had made while exploring the depths, shall we say the dirty depths, of their own nature. But a thousand canonized saints and some hundreds of millions whose names will never make the calendar have felt the same passions, have fought the same fight, and have won the same victory. Sometimes it seems to a pure and noble man under temptation that his brain is on fire. His blood leaps wildly like a mettlesome horse under the whip of passion. The thumping of his heart shakes his whole frame, and worst of all his will seems ready to play traitor to him. If he were a coward he would surrender,---sin, and afterwards explain either with bravado or with a whimper that he "could not stand it," that "no man could stand it," and that he had to do what other men do. But the hero, the saint, sets his teeth, stiffens his jaw, calls upon God and, though he sweat blood, he is not beaten. In the end he wins, and with a great deep sigh of relief and of thanks he lays his victory at the feet of his Maker and his Savior. St. Paul himself does not conclude with that cry of desperation: "who will deliver me from the body of this death." He answers his own question triumphantly, "The grace of God, by Jesus Christ our Lord."
He spoke not from a book nor from theological theory, but from actual experience. When he felt the sting of the flesh, he cried thrice to the Lord to be delivered from temptation. But he received the reply "My grace is sufficient for thee. Thy virtue shall be made perfect through this infirmity." And God, as always, made good His promise.
Also St. Augustine, after that forever famous victory over himself in the garden of the country house of Verecundus, sings a song of praise that I love to call Augustine's Magnificat. It commences, the ninth book of the Confessions: "O Lord I am thy servant: I am thy servant and the son of thy handmaid. Thou hast burst my bonds in sunder, to Thee will I offer the sacrifice of praise. Let my heart and my tongue praise Thee and let all my bones say 'O Lord who is like unto Thee?' Let them speak and do Thou answer and say unto my soul `I am thy salvation.'"
Now, this struggle against temptation is as old as human nature. For human nature is a composite. We are part animal and part angel. The beast is in us, and God is in us. One or the other has to dominate. If the flesh dominates there is hell in the heart. If the spirit dominates there is peace and salvation. That, in brief, is the religious view of human nature and of the moral life.
But in very recent times, with the advent of Freudianism, we have heard much of a new theory. Freud has invented a new name for the instincts and passions that lie deep down at the roots of our nature. He calls them the "urges." And he has invented also the idea of a "censor" who keeps these "urges" out of sight, guarding the gate that separates the conscious from the unconscious. The "censor" prevents the "urge" or passion from breaking through into our conscious life. He is like a lion tamer. He cracks his whip over the "urges" and they cower. He keeps them back, out of sight, so that the master in whose nature they lie lurking doesn't know they are there. But the master suffers from the suppression of passion. He becomes nervous, irritable, perhaps even hysterical or insane. Such is the price he pays for decency, for civilization.
I cannot stop now to discuss that theory. But may remark that the majority of followers of Freud take him to mean that the "censor" guards us only too zealously and that if we are to be healthy and happy we should get rid of the censor and let the "urges" or passions come trooping out into he light of day. If that popular interpretation of the Freudian theory prevails, and the people become convinced that the only way to cure passion is to let it have its way, then we may as well say here and now goodbye to morality, goodbye to decency, and farewell, a long farewell, to civilization.
The better way, the moral way, and as a matter of fact, the only healthy way is for a man himself to open that gate to the underworld of his own nature, boldly go down into the den of his passions, grapple with them, throttle them, and then come back into the light of day, bloody perhaps, but unbowed, master of his own soul, dictator to his own body. This is dirty work indeed, but necessary, like the work of a soldier who goes to battle through blood and mud, beats his way to victory, sticking his bayonet into the belly of this man, crashing the butt of his rifle into the skull of that one, doing a hundred things that are disgusting and loathsome but things that must be done if victory is to be gained.
I noticed that those who advocate what is called in the Freudian jargon the "release of the inhibitions" generally illustrate their doctrine by reference to the passion of lust. But if we are to release lust, why not also anger, greed and gluttony? If you release one passion all the seven deadly sins will swarm upon you, and up on society. After that the deluge, after that chaos. Whether or, not we came out of the jungle, we shall surely go back to the jungle if this popular Freudianism prevails.
But after all that is not the real reason why we cultivate purity. The truly religious idea is that although we may be kin to the beasts physically we are none the less children of God spiritually. The body is indeed animal, but it is the soul that makes, the man. And it is the soul that makes man like a God upon the earth, master of his own life, dictator of his own destiny. Under God, he is a kind of God. Jesus quotes the Scripture: "Have I not said ye are gods?" A god does not go crying and cowering, he, holds his head high. A god does not go lusting about, a victim to the passions of the body. Like a god he says to passion "Thou shalt not." And by that godly domination over the lower, nature he becomes fit to be a companion of the One Great God, the only True God in heaven.