The leprosy is a most foul and loathsome disease which attacks the skin and sometimes spreads itself over almost the entire surface of the body. This pestilential disorder, besides the intense suffering it must cause, renders its victim an object of disgust and aversion to those around him. It seems to have been very prevalent in the East in former times, and during the middle ages it was quite common in Europe, where it was brought by the Crusaders returning from the wars carried on for the possession of the Holy Land. A man infected with leprosy was looked upon by the state as dead, and hence the disease was called civil death. The leper was cut off from all intercourse with his fellows, and compelled to live alone or in the company of other lepers. Leprosy, therefore, subjected a man to the most galling sort of exile, since it forced him to part from home and friends, and to tear asunder every tie which binds the heart of man to this earth and to his fellow-men. The holy Fathers have always regarded leprosy as a strong figure of sin. Sin spreads itself over the soul as leprosy does over the body, tainting and corrupting it, rendering it disgusting in the sight of its Maker, and forcing him to separate it from himself and the company of his angels and saints. {386} Sin, too, forces the soul into exile from God, its true home, and severs all those endearing attachments which cluster round the thought of home. In this sense all mortal sin is a spiritual leprosy; but the one sin which deserves the name above all others is the sin of impurity, because it defiles body and soul alike, and is more infectious even than the ancient leprosy of the East. Impurity not only reproduces its pestilential self, but has, besides, the sickening power of engendering a horde of other frightful maladies distinct from, and only less disgusting than, itself. And yet, alas! impurity is now, as it was in the days of Noe, the crying sin of the world; a sin that is foreign to no class of society, to no order of civilization; a sin that each individual has to take constant and wearisome precautions against, if he would not be infected by its virus, which seems to permeate the very air we breathe, and lurk unseen in the meat and drink we take for the support of life. St. Clement of Alexandria calls impurity the metropolis of vices, by reason, doubtless, of the numberless other vices which are born of it and make their home around it. This leprosy of the soul, impurity, is worse than any leprosy of the body, inasmuch as the death of the soul is an infinitely greater evil than that of the body.