NOTES

New Zealand Tablet, 11 March 1920, Page 26

NOTES

» Saints and Sinners It was perhaps the strongest thing He ever said : Because ye are neither hot. nor cold, I will begin to vomit ye out of My mouth. But it is among the sayings we love most. From the safe man and woman, from the temporiser and the opportunist, O Lord, deliver us ! What is vomited from the mouth is a thing of disgust. Such too were the gloomy, shuddering souls in that grey, wintry circle of the Inferno, not bad enough for hell nor good enough for Heaven. And the Roman poet's scorn was a grand thing: Guarda, e passa, non ragioniamo di loro ! One of these never makes a martyr or a hero. Mary Magdalene whom the dour Pharisees passed by with averted faces—when men were looking— never have been commemorated in every Mass said by a priest since Christ died were she such a soul. Business people, whose heads are developed at the expense of their hearts, are often of the tepid class. Even in the view of worldly men of right ideals, financiers and profiteers are people to be shunned with a scorn like Virgil's. They are the "safe men." People who have not crushed out their hearts, on the other hand, may be great sinners, but they have it in them to become great saints. Magdalene is the eternal type of all such. Once let them find the Love of Christ and they will follow Him to Heaven, without one backward glance at the world. Without the heart, high virtue is not possible : mere apprehension by the head leaves people cold and slow and hesitant. Heroic virtue and heroic sacrifice have their roots in the affections, and without their help the. burning Word will leave men as indifferent as a proposition in Euclid. Father Rickaby says that a man who will not hear of high virtue is scarce fit to be a Christian. Equally true is it. that the man who will not make high sacrifices is not a sincere Christian.

The Will Man is elevated a little less than the angels through two faculties of his soul: the intellect that is capable of knowing Truth, and the will that is capable of loving Good. One day the just man will find in the vision face to face with the Eternal Truth the end of all the haunting questions of life and in union of the will with the supreme Good the eternal, halcyon question of his restless will. The will is the driving force in man's life, and on the right or wrong use of freewill depends finally man's destiny. 'Among the philosophers who tried to solve the problem of the endless human yearning that lasts as long as life was Schopenhauer, who came to the conclusion that there could be no peace as long as the will remained unsatisfied. So far he was right, but when he went on to explain how peace would come he made a. huge mistake. The will, in his conception, is a pendulum that swings back and forward from the cradle to the grave. Zenith follows nadir, and nadir zenith. One wish is attained and a new one born. An imaginary happiness is grasped and found unsatisfying; and a new quest begins again. To and fro, to and .fro, from rest begotten of momentary satiety to ennui that drives again, the pendulum swings, year in, year out. And the end? It can be no other, says this sophist, than the total annihilation of the will: a state of Nirvana in which there is neither capacity of volition nor possibility of pleasure or disgust. Schopenhauer, like all materialists ignored the true solution. Not in inanition and annihilation, but in the very plenitude of action which unites the will to its only adequate object, the eternal

Good which contains in itself pre-eminently and transcendentally all possible objects of human desire, lies the solution of the unrest and yearning of humanity. Union with God and the tasting of the sweetness of the Lord is the one thing that makes Heaven the source of happiness such as eye seeth not nor ear heareth and the heart conceiveth not. And so, once more, the child who knows his penny catechism can solve easily the riddle that baffles the blind philosophers.

Ennui Mr. Dooley's greatest obstacle when lie came to make New Year resolutions was that if he gave up quarrelling with Hogan he might die of "ongwee." Readers of Heine will remember his mordant description of the Englishman driven by ennui all over the Continent, through art galleries that he cannot appreciate, into churches which his dull soul cannot admire, among grand mountains and by broad rivers whose scenery is all lost on him, and finally back again to the greater ennui of his own misty, grey land. It is a terrible disease, this boredom, this taedium vitae, this emptiness of mind and spirit that lowers men until they are little higher than the brutes; and it is becoming more prevalent as time goes on, bringing in its lapse deeper materialism, more sordid satiety, less ground for hope and faith in a belter and higher world. Aimless lives, souls driven hither and thither like the spirits seen by Dante in the bit fern in femalethat swept them past like a whirl of dead leaves, are common nowadays, and the farther men recede from the healthy joyousness of Christian customs the faster the disease will spread. It is essentially a pagan disease, and nowhere was it better described than in the pages of the pagan poet Lncrece. What a picture of the man who is consumed by ennui we have in the following lines : h'.'/f saepe foras may mix aedibns ex Mis, j-juxc (lonium quern /tertaesi/ni est, snbifoqtte revert'd, Qttippe forts nilo melius qui sett fiat esse. Gun-it. agens mannas ad villain praecipitanier, .1 Milium tectis quasi ferre ardent ib us installs; (Jxcit-at e.rcmplo, t-etif/it rmn. limina /■'/Hue, Ant ah it in somnum gravis, at que obfivia quaerit; Ant etiam properans urban petit, at que revisit. The English of which is: "He goes out of his magnificent palace, tired to death of being in the house, and he comes back again quickly, for he feels that he is no better out. 'lie rushes away, driving his steeds headlong to his villa as if he were going to put out a house on fire. Once across its threshold he either falls asleep, seeking oblivion, or else hurries back to town again." Idleness, says the old proverb, is the mother of mischief; and it is also the parent of ennui. The man whose hands are hard from honest toil knows no ennui ; and to him repose comes as a blessed solace after labor." The student who loves his books never finds life tiresome or its days too long, and it is with difficulty von will drag him away from his library. The spiritual man who knows that each moment has an eternal value has no sense of ennui, because he has no time to waste For those who are not engaged in constant hard work or who are not earnest students, or who do not know the meaning of eternity and what a value time has 1? r!i. hgllfc ° f that meanin g- it is often recommended that they should have some hobby to engage their attention, lest worse things happen them. As ennui is a disorder, its remedy lies in order; and as a life of order is the only life fit for a human being, the prescription lor the disease is in three words Be a Man I

Act, act in the living present, Heart within and God o’erhead.