LUST
5. LUST
"Unto the pure all things are pure: but unto those who are defiled and unbelieving, nothing is pure — but even their mind and conscience is defiled." Titus 1:15.
We come this evening to that subject on which it is at once most necessary and most difficult to speak. Fourth of the deadly sins is Lust — the term includes impurity, immorality, sensual passion, unhallowed love. What sin so horrible, so hopeless?
Love is the first and the last — the highest good. Life without love is death-in-life. God, the Eternal, says of Himself, that He is Love. God nowhere calls Himself Force, or Motion, but "God is Love." And the love of God is shed abroad in the hearts of men by the Holy Spirit: men must love God, and one another. "And now abides Faith, Hope, Charity, these three, but the greatest of these is charity." And charity is pure and holy love. What must it be, to do what the devil does, and turn holy love into unholy lust? What plague is in that sin! What death-sickness, what fanning of black wings of night, what ascending of the smoke of their torment — who are captive in that sin! The best, when corrupted — becomes the worst. No art, no sophistry, can conceal the simple, unrelieved, unmitigated horror of that state, in which impure passion usurps the place of the sacred flame which burns eternally in the bosom of God, which makes the light and glory of the angel host, and assures the salvation of loyal and holy souls.
"To the pure all things are pure." Yes, that is most true. But what of the defiled and the unbelieving? What value in any judgment on the questions now before us, given by the man who does not believe, by the woman
already tainted and defiled by immorality? To such, nothing is pure, and when these apologize for lust or try to smooth down the roughness of the carnal side of life, it is a sign that even their mind and conscience are defiled. And this is the first danger of the hour — that we be deceived by the false judgments of those who represent the spirit of the age; that a perverted public opinion may deprave our moral sense; that our mind and conscience may become so affected by the wide diffusion of the evil, by the frequency of the loathsome sights, by familiarity with this shape of luxury and lust — that we shall no longer be able to discern the real horror of the shadow of this death.
God has set in human nature a fountain and well-spring of Desire. It was, at first, as pure as crystal; and it was intended to set perpetually toward its home and source in the ocean of the love of God. All holy desires proceed from God. And holy desires in us are those, and those only, which proceed from God and tend to God, through any mediate object which is desired and loved in Him according to His will. But desire and love which have not their object in Him, and are not after His will — are unholy. This was the doleful change which came through the Fall, when for the will of God was substituted the will of the flesh, when pure love and holy desire became the foul thing which we call lust. The fountain was poisoned at its source; ever since has it poured forth bitterness and pollution.
When Adam fell, the first result of his transgression was shame; "they knew that they were naked," and they knew what that meant, and they hid themselves among the trees of the Garden, ashamed and conscience-smitten. That deep disgrace is what it was, and ever shall be. But men have become hardened, until they feel it no more. They have lived in that shame. Crazed and mad, they have set up the lust of the flesh as a natural and innocent desire. Of this fourth of the Deadly Sins, they have spoken as if it were a virtue; schools of poets have made the praise of the corruptible flesh their special theme; philosophers of the Epicureans and the abandoned have honored it with their commendation; painters and sculptors have gone into unseemly raptures over the study of the nude and its incessant presentation to the sight. And when unrestrained by fear of God or faith in God, and able to wallow freely in this mire — men have taken the final step in their madness, and exalted carnal lust into a horrible cultus which they called their religion.
Nothing is so striking to the eye, in those old systems of Paganism which were overthrown by the Religion of the Cross — as their immorality. They were the embodiment of whatever is most corrupt and obscene; masterpieces of the Devil contrived to work eternal alienation between man and God.
Clement, of Alexandria, has painted the portraits of those old systems in colors which will never fade. Awful beyond telling is that picture; I could not relate the tenth part of what he left on record, without sending you from this place with horror and shame in your faces. What an age that was, in which our Savior came! He appeared among defiled and unbelieving men to whom nothing was pure, whose mind and conscience were denied. There, on the one side, were the skeptical inquirers, with their doubts and theories, the infidel philosophers denying God, the immortality of the soul, the existence of the spiritual world, and everything that lost men can deny. And there, on the other side, were the true children of these unstable leaders, whose moral state was too shocking, too revolting to bear description.
This was what Christ encountered; with this was the first battle joined, when the cry went out, along the lines of the Militant Church, "The whole world lies in wickedness, and we know that the Son of God is come." Great were the victories of that first age; but it would be a mistake to suppose that the battle is won. It goes on, it has gone on since then, with varied fortunes. The old trouble is still about us — its marks are on the bodies and the souls of men — nor up to this hour has a remedy been found for this loathsome disease of immorality and carnal lust, apart from the Gospel of Jesus Christ.
It is an idle dream that Christ and His disciples expected, as the result of their work, the speedy conversion of the whole world, and the transformation of the sin-struck earth — into a paradise of purity and peace. Not so. Christ came to make Atonement for Sin, and to found the Kingdom of God. But the Kingdom was to have long battle with the Powers of Darkness, before the end — and still the war lasts. Human nature is what it was; men are what they were — slaves to sin and lust, unwilling to take on them the yoke of the Savior, to bow before the cross.
The battle today is substantially the battle of the First Age — the Church, against the World; the Faith and principles of the Gospel, against Pagan philosophy and Pagan habits of thought. And the strength of the Deadly Sins lies in their accord with the natural desire of the heart, and that finds its just expression in Pagan principle and Pagan practice.
How does it stand with this Sin of Lust? Its ally, its basis — is a certain naturalistic and materialistic theory of our life — that very theory which, as taught of old, made the earth a sink of corruption. And if today men are going back to Pagan philosophy and Pagan habits of thought, to Pagan arguments, principles, and ideas, be certain of this — that they will also be inclined to take up Pagan notions of morality, and to think as the heathen used to think about these dreadful subjects; to find a glamour in that awful past, to feel compelled to invent excuses and apologies for it, and even to look wistfully to many a scene in that panorama of vanity and corruption .
Such is the peril of the hour in which we live: that of following the natural notions of immorality and lust, and justifying the action by appeal to the principles of naturalism and materialism, and setting up the claim that these things are not evil, but laudable, lovely, and of profit to mankind.
Ever since the history of the human race began, that evil spirit who is God's enemy and ours, has maintained a double propaganda in the earth. It exists today, and here, in our city, and among ourselves: The Propaganda of Infidelity , and the Propaganda of Impurity . That these two work together, always, and in the same direction, seems too plain for anyone to deny it with success. We see this in the dreadful picture of the Gentile civilization as described by Paul the Apostle; in the state of the heathen, as found, ignorant, naked, and immoral, by the missionaries of the cross; and we see it as distinctly as ever in the most logical of the great nations of modern Europe.
France is the land where people have ideas and carry them out to their consequences — and in France you see, afflicting the better classes and the religious and devout among her sons and daughters, a political propaganda of atheism, and a literary and artistic carnival of indecency . There have we beheld the assault of the national government on religion, on its institutions, its symbols, and the people of its ministers; the name of God erased from books of public instruction, the cross torn down in schools and courts of justice, the ministers insulted, and, as far as possible, reduced to inaction. There also do we find a licentious literature, culminating in recent works which take rank with the filthiest of any country or any age. There also flourishes a school of art which revels in vulgarity and shame, as if to present the human body to view, in every conceivable and inconceivable attitude of shameful and disgraceful display, where the province of art is at its highest and best. The double propaganda thus shows itself at work, in past and present alike; it is accentuated more sharply as we look on with amazement and disgust; and men are found apologizing first, and then applauding , until, with an exquisite refinement of hypocrisy at which devils must be laughing, these defiled unbelievers venture to say, referring to themselves, "To the pure, all things are pure."
What is our own society? It has almost ceased to have a national tone; the old American life and ways are overlaid and hidden; this is the land to which enormous delegations from other lands migrate; it seems a great assemblage, a conglomerate, of many and strongly contrasted civilizations. Nowhere has there ever been a better field for the devil's double propaganda — and all about us are the signs of his activity. True, there are checks which still restrain the evil — but each day some barrier gives way. To keep to the straight and narrow path of settled principle, clean living, and purity of heart — is harder now, for our young people than it was a quarter of a century ago; because a false sentiment, widely influential, condones their excesses, and even approves of their sins.
It is a well-known fact that Societies have been organized among us for the suppression of vice, and it is equally well known that the most violent opponents of the operation of such societies are the free-thinkers and skeptics of the day. How easy would it be to spend a couple of hours in giving instances of our decadence and moral decline! I shall not attempt any such thing. Straws show , it is said, how the wind blows ; and it will suffice to note, as rapidly as possible, some few matters which justify a deep and growing alarm lest worse than this is near at hand.
Note, first, the execrable quality of much that the people READ. To refer to the public journals, is but to begin — they feed a taste for what is vulgar, coarse, and base, with copious daily supplies of stuff adapted to that unwholesome appetite. But these annals of degraded life are supplemented by fiction of the same tone; by novels whose heroes and heroines are libertines; and vain and immoral women, and whose plots are a net-work of seduction, adultery, divorce, murder, and suicide — by that special kind of poetry, justly named "the fleshy," in which this vile body of ours, with its stirring passions and their manifestation, forms the perpetual theme.
Sensation-novels , dashed with as much indecency as possible, and sensuous poetry , in which the ideal and the fleshly are one and the same thing — form a quality of mind and temper which finds further attraction in the Drama, as we have it now — in large measure a repetition of the old, old story of the working of lust, and garnished with dances which gratify man's sensual appetite and attest woman's debauchery and shame.
Such minds, such souls as these, may turn to art for a new excitement, and they find it in the imported works of foreign schools, such as we have referred to, and in those of a home school which follows the lead of debauchery and devotes itself, mainly if not exclusively, to the delineation of lascivious figures. To these demonstrations of immoral craving and declining taste, response is made by book-stalls and news-stands on the street, and by many a shop-window, where vile wood-cuts and engravings meet the eye, and advance the work of corrupting the public mind. Do doubt the thing would be much worse than it is but for the agency of the police, who, under the indignant protest of decent citizens, compel the dealers in obscene literature to keep within bounds, and prevent them from poisoning the atmosphere as thoroughly as they would like to do.
It would be painful to inquire what kind of life is developed under the influences thus at work for our ruin; to gauge, with the line and plummet of God's Word — the demoralization of society. For some of this there may be excuse; for example, think how the lowest classes live, in tenements, crowded together in such ways that it is impossible to be decent, that children cannot be brought up like Christians, that young men and women can hardly by any chance be kept honest, chaste, and pure. But what shall be said of some among the higher classes, whose sins are without justification, and denote impurity, irreligion, unbelief?
Look how young girls are trained in softness and luxury — with the one idea of making a figure in society and a brilliant marriage — of making the most of their physical advantages, and alluring the other gender by the arts best adapted to that purpose. See them on the drive through the troubled social sea — at their lunch-parties — with a dozen courses and half as many kinds of wine; at the opera — immodestly attired; at the ball , giving the whole night to dissipation; at the summer haunts of fashion — without due oversight or sense of responsibility, treated with easy familiarity by careless men, and apparently without a vestige of an idea of what is due to a gentlewoman from a man.
Listen to the base gossip among these young women; to the broad speeches and unclean stories by which they are prepared for the final surrender of the last ideas of propriety, and of all faith in the honor and virtue of men.
Then pass on, and let us look at the woman as married — married, perhaps, for her money, or marrying some man for his money, without love, and often without respect — married, but with no idea of living thereafter under marital bonds, resolved to be more free, and to enjoy life more; eager for admiration, athirst for compliments and flattery, so that the husband early drops into a secondary position, and some other man engrosses the larger share of her thoughts. Follow out this subject until you come to the divorce suit, and the separation , and thence to the next, an adulterous marriage , with those whom the Gospel forbid to marry, so long as the spouse lives — snap their fingers at the attempted restriction, and commence a second marriage without fear and without remorse.
We all know that these are the commonest things of the day. We see men freely moving in high social places whom no respectable woman would permit to cross her threshold; notorious immorality condoned for the sake of great wealth; grave social scandals, widely known and openly canvassed, though the actors are received with open hand and made welcome as before. Flirtations going on between people, each of whom has plighted troth, to someone else, and thus stands perjured before man and God. Men lusting after the wives of other men. And married men running after young girls and paying them attention, with the devil's look in the eyes and the devil's thoughts in the heart. And women, young and old, permitting these demonstrations, agreeably entertained and flattered by them, and glad to find themselves still able to make conquests .
There are, undoubtedly, people among us who prefer vice — to virtue; and the excitement of passion — to the testimony of a good conscience and a pure heart; who like the stimulus of sin, and would deem it an awful misfortune and an unspeakable affliction — to have to live soberly, righteously, and godly in this present world.
Our danger is not in the fact that there are such as these in the world — for such have there always been — but the danger-line is reached when no strong public opinion is against them , when a general approval hardens their hearts; when others, who would live orderly and honorable lives, find it uphill work to do so; when chastity and modesty are sneered at, and those who will not join hand in hand with the immoral, are voted to be dull and slow, and bidden to stand off, and keep out of the way, and hold their tongues, nor interfere with this grand business of enjoying the pleasures of this present world.
I have gone as far as I dare go; and yet have done no more than to skim the bubbling cauldron , and take off what comes to the top, leaving the black broth below, a thing too foul to be described. But the scum is an index to what is underneath ; and if these things whereof we have spoken go on in sight — what, do you think, goes on behind closed doors? How appalling must be the record of one night only, when the shadow lies black on this vast city! What crimes must that deep gloom conceal, what sights to scare good angels away!
The slums, the taverns, the dance-halls, and the ball-rooms;
the theaters, high and low, the virtually naked creatures on the stage, and the virtually naked creatures in the box seats;
the men behind the scenes dallying with the actresses;
the banquets, the champagne-suppers, and the sequel;
the printers setting up vile stuff to flood the country with filth by morning light;
the false men, pretending absence on some lawful occasion, and breaking plighted troth and vow;
the agonized wives, keeping the long, maddened vigil of jealousy;
the silly fool dreaming of her admirers in her unchaste slumber;
the young man void of understanding met in the black and dark night by the woman with the attire of a harlot, subtle of heart, whose house is the way to Hell, going down to the chambers of death;
the eye of the adulterer waiting for the twilight, saying, no man shall see me , and disguising his face;
the golden youth, spending the small hours from midnight to dawn in dissipation, squandering paternal fortunes and dragging honored names in the dust;
the animals in the drug-houses, and that grimy, gruesome herd whom someone out of the upper air sometimes beholds when he goes, with a policeman to protect him, through the inmost labyrinth of metropolitan corruption.
Great God of Heaven and Earth, and You, Holy Redeemer, what awful sights are these, and what a world it is which You did come to purify and save! And these are the workings of one and the self-same mortal sin; and this is the outcome, when Holy and Eternal Love, the first of virtues and the last, is turned into immoral and unholy lust!
Come and let us leave these horrible paths, and look for a road whereon to walk, clean and free. Each of the deadly sins has its opposite virtue. The counterpart to lust is purity , the crowning grace of the Gospel. Come away from the haunts of sinners against their own souls, from those who are dead while they live; and let us refresh ourselves in the company of the pure in heart.
First, then, our Blessed Lord Himself was pure; a Lamb without blemish and without spot; unlike us in that one thing, that He was "holy, undefiled, and separate from sinners." And so, being born of a pure Virgin, and being Himself more pure than the dews of the morning or the freshly driven snow, He made that virtue of Purity a law in His Kingdom, and gave it in germ as a gift in our regeneration.
Next, the Lord testified and said, "Blessed are the pure in heart — for they shall see God." And this He said in that vile age of the world of which we spoke some time ago, and which some would gladly reproduce, in its characteristic sinful deformity, in our own day. In the decadence of the old Roman Empire, in the hearing of the court and the forum, in the ears of Felix and Festus, of the cultured Epicureans at Athens, and the harlots of Corinth, unto the bloated Pharisee and the crafty Sadducee, unto people like ourselves, who loved and justified their sins, as we love and justify ours — did the Lord announce and declare, "Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God." And, lest that word should return to Him void, He instituted a divine sacrament, a heavenly and supernatural mystery, so that every believer became a temple of the Holy Spirit.
The material body, which is the object of inordinate desire, and may be made the instrument of fornication and all other deadly sin — Christ "washed, and sanctified, and justified," by "the washing of regeneration and the renewing of the Holy Spirit, which He shed on men abundantly;" so that each true believer is become a temple of the Holy Spirit, which it is destruction to defile and profane, and thus the Beatitude received its realization.
On the foundation thus laid by their Lord, the Apostles gladly built. They preached of discipline; of self-denial; of keeping the flesh under control, and bringing it into subjection. They talked to men and women of their sins, not in smooth speech, or words to plaster over the ulcer and the plague-spot. They bade men flee fornication as a deadly crime which bars from Heaven; they bade women be chaste and pure, and love their husbands and children, and be keepers at home, and adorn themselves with good works. And great were the joy and peace of those who heard the counsel and followed it; blessed, of a truth, were the pure in heart, in their lives, yes, in their heroic death.
Open the Annals of the Martyrs, the Acts of the Saints, and see the courage with which men, matrons, and maidens laid down their lives, rather than suffer pollution in that lascivious age; glorious are the records, clear in silver light, around which the black cloud of pagan luxury and lust surges up and glooms, and rolls away, like the storm-drift before the stars. Christ spoke no word in vain: least of all, vainly, that blessing on the pure .
Nothing corrupts like fleshly sin; nothing degrades like sensual passion; nothing else brings such frightful punishment. On the other side: no victory is grander than the victory over this sin; nothing more precious than uncontaminated virtue and unspotted honor; nothing lifts a soul so near to God as inner purity. A pure soul cannot be lost — its path is straight to the Face of the Eternal God.
O man, O woman, battling against the devil and the sinful lust of the flesh, hating that which is filthy and unclean, longing to be like the angels, and never relaxing your vigilance against your foe — you are not far from your reward; some mere clouds divide you from it; a little while longer, and those clouds will have dispersed, and with open eye, triumphant over the final assault, and delivered from the burden and temptation of the flesh, you shall receive the promise — you shall see God .
Beloved brethren in Christ, we have walked through dangerous places: we have had before us what it is not good to think of. But learn your duty from the very aspect of the world. It is in no hopeful spirit that the preacher bids to self-denial, to self-discipline, to brave resistance, on this perilous ground. He has against him — and full well he knows it — the voice of the heart which is a sink of everything impure , which is toward greater license and increased indulgence, the teaching of a school who know no God but Nature, and no law but that law which is in our members, the example, alas! of people who give no help, and increase, by their follies, the demoralization of the day.
O how we long for the aid of Christian women, and their overwhelming influence, in this day of strife and contention! What work they could do as reformers , what work for the purifying of the world! I think of some not here, I see some before me, fitted by their social position, their gifts, their strong character, to take a position which would help others. I see hardly one, whatever her station, who could not wield some influence over some person or in some direction for good. And yet I see the wrong prevailing over the right, the impure over the pure; the altars of the heathen temples burning with perpetual fire, and the altar of the Lord in the dust. O woman, woman, called of God, redeemed by Christ — think of your duty and your influence!
You know how things go — what books young women read — with what bad men they talk — how they are tempted — the unclean gossip that goes on, the jests which pass the lips — and how women allow men to talk to them in a way in which, of old, one woman could not have talked to another without blushing for shame; how immodestly they dress and how they behave; how they tolerate bad manners and induce familiarity; how they laugh at modest women, and term them prudes and cowards; how one season in society will take the bloom from the flower and the modest look from the eyes. And you look on, and make no protest — perhaps you even encourage immorality by your example. What can we do without your help? And why, slaves to fashion, and blinded followers of types of a most unworthy womanhood — do you let us go on speaking to the winds, and hearing no response to our protests except their echoes through the empty air?
We say to one, we say to all: This is a subject of vital consequence to your own souls and to the society in which we move. It is nothing less than matter of life or death.
We say to one, we say to all: Christ and His Apostles are right, and atheistic philosophy, be the era what it may, is wrong. Men may fall away from the faith, heathen morals and manners may be revived, are may become the ministrant to sin, and women may go dressed like harlots and say it is not wrong , and men may applaud. But it is wrong, and a shame, and a disgrace, and a mortal sin, of which the wages is death.
We say to one, we say to all: That inordinate and lustful desire is a devil; and that you must fight it by prayer, by abstinence, by obedience to the precepts of the Church; by flight; by self-inflicted pain if necessary, that the soul may be saved in the day of the Lord Jesus.
These things we say, to one, to all, to high and low, to rich and poor, to men and women — and there we leave it. Perhaps some may have grace to heed the voice; probably the greater part will go their way, and do as they think best; and some will call us hard names, and cry out that we are behind the age, and morbid, and ignorant. Let them so take up their parable, and so let them curse — but the day comes that shall burn as an oven, and then shall they know, if they know it not already, that God gave them full warning, and that, of a truth, there was a prophet among them!