Page:Essays on Catholicism, Liberalism, and Socialism.djvu/230

seeming old age, and the aged perish. Man is despoiled by pleasure of the strength of his will, of the vigor of his understanding, and loses the instinct of great things. He becomes cynically selfish, excessively cruel, and nameless passions violently agitate him. If he is of mean condition, he will fall from the hands of justice into the hands of the executioner. If he is of exalted rank, he will excite terror and indignation by the unrestrained indulgence of his rapacious and ferocious instincts. When God wishes to chastise a nation for its sins, he enslaves it under the dominion of voluptuous men, who, stupefied with the opium of sensual gratification, can only be aroused from their brutal insensibility by the fumes of blood. All those horrid monsters, whom the pretorians in the days of imperial Rome saluted as emperors, were voluptuous and effeminate men. Revolutionary France worshiped at the same time prostitution and death; while prostitution triumphed in her temples and at her altars, death was worshiped in her public places and on her scaffolds.

There is, then, something corrosive and malefic in pleasure, as there is in pain something purifying and divine. However, it must not be supposed that because these things are of a contrary nature, they do not in some sense agree; for, he who freely accepts grief has an innate consciousness of spiritual joy, which fortifies and elevates him; in the same manner that he who gives himself up to pleasure experiences a kind of grief which, in place of strengthening, enervates and depresses him. Suffering is the universal punishment that all must endure; wherever man looks around him, or in whatever direction he may go, he meets with grief, a mute and weeping statue, ever before him. Grief has this, in common with