Conscience and Sin: Daily Meditations for Lent, Including Week-days and Sundays — John Shaqi
Conscience and Sin: Daily Meditations for Lent, Including Week-days and SundaysBaring-Gould, S. (Sabine)
Religion
Conscience and Sin: Daily Meditations for Lent, Including Week-days and Sundays
Baring-Gould, S. (Sabine)
Conscience; Lent -- Prayers and devotions; Sin
(_a_) By _Pride_ it impels the individual to assume a place to which
he has no right, or to refuse to the rest those concessions which are
necessary to make social harmony possible. Man rebels against being
only one among many, and endeavours to thrust himself into prominence
by arrogating to himself what does not lawfully belong to him.
(_b_) By _Jealousy_ men are excited the one against the other. They
envy each other the place, the wealth, the respect, that they have
obtained. All men cannot have the same position, the same wealth, and
the same respect; there must be difference among the members of the
community, as there are differences among the members of the body.
Sin is an attack on Society when, through envy, it stirs up class
jealousies, and stimulates hostility between different members of the
social body.
(_c_) By _Cupidity_. Men, in their selfish greed to arrogate to
themselves all things desirable, use the strength, opportunities,
position they have, to draw to themselves the good things of this
world, to the despoiling of their fellows. Our Lord warns against love
of Mammon. No man, He said, could serve God and Mammon, that is,
riches; and one reason is, that this greed after wealth is not for the
distributing of means of subsistence among the many, and the relief
of the necessitous, but in order that it all may be retained for the
glorification and indulgence of self.
3. These three motives for the breaking-up of Society are all of
Diabolic inspiration. As God is the author of unity, so is Satan the
source of all schism. God brings men together, and inspires to the
sacrifice of their individual caprices to the general good; the Evil
One, on the other hand, urges to the undue exaltation of the individual
self, so as to procure separation. He is the cause of discord in
families, of the sapping of the principles of unity in the State, and
to heresies and schisms that rend the Church. In a family, in the
State, in the Church, all members, all classes, all orders, are bound
together for the common good, and the Divine Spirit is in every social
body as a good ferment--working out of it what is evil. But the Spirit
of Evil is the spirit of decomposition, which breaks up all unity. It
is in the family, in the State, in the Church, what death is to that
unity, the living man--a break-up into warring units.
[Illustration]
Fifth Friday in Lent.
_THE EFFECTS OF SIN._
We will now consider what are the effects produced by Sin. These
effects are _general_ and _particular_.
The general effects of Sin are as follows:--
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