Our age is constructive in many ways, but it is also an age that has tried might and main to destroy the idea of sin.

Men have always sinned, just as men have always known the horrors of cancer and the plague. It has been left for our age to develop religions that deny both the fact of sin and the fact of cancer, and to expand philosophies which find no more harm in sinning than they do in sneezing.

It is a little difficult, perhaps, to talk about sin to a group who know almost nothing about God. If there is no God to command, there are naturally no Commandments. If there is no one to reward or punish, it is silly to talk of eternal sanctions. Yet every man recognizes within himself that he has been given a power unlike any other creature—the power of free choice.

God gave man liberty. He may do this or that, choose to act wisely or to play the fool, to strike his friend and kiss his enemy, to do the world signal service or to play havoc among men and women. He has a free will that makes possible the most astonishing alternative: He, in spite of his perishable body and limited brain, may stand in the presence of the Almighty Who created him and hold high debate: “Shall I serve You, God, or shall I defy You?” And God Himself will not force him to a decision.

Far from being trivial and unimportant, man is so important that God asks him for free service and will accept no other.

When God created the earth, He turned over to man a large share in its management. Man might, if he proved faithful, manage it well; he had it in his power utterly to mismanage it. By good deeds he carried on the affairs of the earth splendidly; by sin he upset the moral universe.

Sin is unimportant? It is the most terrible power loosed on the world.

The very frequency of sin is often used as an argument against its seriousness. Surely, people say, nothing so common can be very terrible. But there are some things that commonness does not make less dreadful. It does not take the terror from death or cancer or leprosy. On the contrary, it makes them seem more terrible. And sin is in that same class.

Sin, by the sad perversity of mankind, is frequent, repeated, almost common, but that fact makes it just the more terrible.

Of course, sin brings its nervous thrill and its moment of fascinating pleasure. No one denies that. But, as it does so, it destroys the possibility of peace, sows the seeds of inescapable remorse, sets strange ghosts walking the dark corridors of the mind, and lies in wait for the day when it will flash before the sinner the consequences of his sin which he refused to consider when he found in it his moments or his years of joy.

The sinner can only be part of a man. He must substitute for the whole of life only his sinful part of it. He must close his life to everything but his vice and what he hopes to wring from it, or he is doomed to misery.

The only thing that keeps sin from seeming terrifying beyond all else is the fact that it cannot at first be recognized in the sinner. If the filthy thought in the mind found its counterpart in a filthiness in the face; if, when one scarred one’s soul with slander, one scarred one’s cheek with a jagged cut; if the leprosy of sin infecting the soul spread to the body in white, dry scales, men would regard sin with very different eyes.

Yet even though sin may be hidden for a time, it leaves its mark. It hardens the heart, deadens sympathy, and slowly robs the soul of the beauty for which God created it.

Whatever clever philosophies may say, the facts remain. Men sin. Sin is terrible in itself and in its consequences. Every man knows that. And the sinner knows it clearest of all.

Some Illustrations by Father Lord

The Worm and the Man

“Suppose,” he argues on, “as I walk my garden paths some morning, a worm wriggles up from the damp sod and spits at me. Does it harm me? Of course not. There’s no proportion between myself and the worm. Beside me the worm is simply too insignificant for consideration.

“So, by your own concept of the greatness of God, sin becomes a trifle. It is nothing but a tiny man spitting at your great God. It is a lapdog snapping at a tolerant lion. It is a child shaking its feeble fist in the direction of a giant.”

The argument begins and ends with the assumption that man, like the worm, is really unimportant. But is he? Let’s suppose that the man walking in his garden goes back and wrathfully grinds the obnoxious worm into the mud. That is the end of the worm. Its mangled body makes richer the loam in which the grass is rooted, but the worm’s whole existence ended under the grinding heel of the man.

Man, however, is a very different sort of being. When the heel of death grinds his body to dust, his soul goes on with the immortality that shall last as long as God is God. Nothing that is immortal can be regarded as unimportant or trivial.

Sin Is Common

There are some things that commonness does not affect in that way. It does not take the terror from death or cancer or leprosy. On the contrary, it makes them seem more terrible. And sin is in that same class.

Nothing, surely, is as common as death. Sixty thousand people, we are told, die each day. But the fact that 60,000 people are dying is small consolation to the young husband who stands at the death-bed of his bride.

If one cancer is terrible, a hospital filled with cancer patients is a place of horror. One solitary leper by the roadside is an object of abhorrence; a leper colony is our earthly symbol of hell.

And so it is with sin. Sin, by the sad perversity of mankind, is frequent, repeated, almost common, but that fact makes it just the more terrible.

If Sin Could Be Seen

The only thing that keeps sin from seeming terrifying beyond all else is the fact that it cannot at first be recognized in the sinner. Man knows that today he can sin and tonight shake the hand of his friend without his friend’s suspecting the change in his soul.

If the filthy thought in the mind found its concomitant in a filthiness in the face; if, when one scarred one’s soul with slander, one scarred one’s cheek with a jagged cut; if the leprosy of sin infecting the soul spread to the body in white, dry scales, men would regard sin with very different eyes.

The Ghost of Sin

When Macbeth saw at every feast the ghost of the murdered Banquo, he was merely the poet’s symbol of sinners who, try as they will, cannot shut out from their consciousness the consequences of their sins. Sooner or later their sins rise to haunt them. Mankind has always known that for a fact, and pagan literature, quite as much as Christian, is filled with the story of supposedly dead sins living on to rise and taunt the sinner.

“Don’t get serious about a boy who is not willing to prove himself by avoiding sin, especially impurity and drunkenness, frequenting the sacraments, and spending a reasonable amount of time in prayer daily. Never think of marrying someone who will not be able to make you better for living with him, for the foundation of a happy marriage is a holy love which will enable you to aid each other to practice virtue and fulfill your duties.” –Fr. Lovasik, Clean Love in Courtship

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A Shepherd in Combat Boots

Kapaun’s faith and courage on the battlefield and in prison set an example for hundreds of young American captives. When they were starving, he stole food for them. If the men needed encouragement, he defied prison rules and prayed with them. When the communist guards mocked his faith in God, the chaplain publicly defended his beliefs…  (afflink)

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The Will to Win ~ Available here.

This booklet was written with the object of putting in a simple and brief form the substance of the author’s larger book “Strength of Will.” The author addresses himself directly to the Catholic Boys of America, but he trusts Catholic Girls will understand that, as they bear equal responsibility for the future of their Faith and Fatherland, the booklet is meant equally for them. The author feels that he cannot do justice to his subject in so short a booklet, and recommends those Boys or Girls who become interested in it, to read his larger book.

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