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| Chapter IX
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Chapter
IX.
Custom is indeed in everything hard to resist. It possesses an enormous
power of attracting and seducing the soul. In the cases where a man has
got into a fixed state of sentiment, a certain imagination of the good
is created in him by this habit; and nothing is so naturally vile but
it may come to be thought both desirable and laudable, once it has got
into the fashion1390
| 1390 οὐδὲν οὕτω
τῇ φύσει
φευκτόν
ἐστιν, ὡς, κ. τ.
λ. Both Livineius and Galesinius have
missed the meaning here. Jac. Billius has rightly interpreted,
“Nihil naturâ tam turpe ac fugiendum est, quin,
si,” &c. | . Take mankind now
living on the earth. There are many nations, and their ambitions are
not all the same. The standard of beauty and of honour is different in
each, the custom of each regulating their enthusiasm and their aims.
This unlikeness is seen not only amongst nations where the pursuits of
the one are in no repute with the other, but even in the same nation, and the
same city, and the same family; we may see in those aggregates also
much difference existing owing to customary feeling. Thus brothers born
from the same throe are separated widely from each other in the aims of
life. Nor is this to be wondered at, considering that each single man
does not generally keep to the same opinion about the same thing, but
alters it as fashion influences him. Not to go far from our present
subject, we have known those who have shown themselves to be in love
with chastity all through the early years of puberty; but in taking the
pleasures which men think legitimate and allowable they make them the
starting-point of an impure life, and when once they have admitted
these temptations, all the forces of their feeling are turned in that
direction, and, to take again our illustration of the stream, they let
it rush from the diviner channel into low material channels, and make
within themselves a broad path for passion; so that the stream of their
love leaves dry the abandoned channel of the higher way1391
| 1391 ἐπὶ
τὰ ἄνω, Reg. Cod.,
better than τὸ | and flows abroad in indulgence. It would be
well then, we take it, for the weaker brethren to fly to virginity as
into an impregnable fortress, rather than to descend into the career of
life’s consequences and invite temptations to do their worst upon
them, entangling themselves in those things which through the lusts of
the flesh war against the law of our mind; it would be well for them to
consider1392
| 1392 Reading φροντίζοντας, with Reg. Cod. | that herein they risk not broad acres,
or wealth, or any other of this life’s prizes, but the hope which
has been their guide. It is impossible that one who has turned to the
world and feels its anxieties, and engages his heart in the wish to
please men, can fulfil that first and great commandment of the Master,
“Thou shalt love God with all thy heart and with all thy
strength1393
.” How can he fulfil that, when
he divides his heart between God and the world, and exhausts the love
which he owes to Him alone in human affections? “He that is
unmarried careth for the things of the Lord; but he that is married
careth for the things that are of the world1394
.” If the combat with pleasure seems
wearisome, nevertheless let all take heart. Habit will not fail to
produce, even in the seemingly most fretful1395
| 1395 τοῖς
δυσκολωτάτοις; better than to take this as a neuter. | , a
feeling of pleasure through the very effort of their perseverance; and
that pleasure will be of the noblest and purest kind; which the
intelligent may well be enamoured of, rather than allow themselves,
with aims narrowed by the lowness of their objects, to be estranged
from the true greatness which goes beyond all thought.E.C.F. INDEX & SEARCH
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