CHAPTER XXI
SAINT BERNARD
shame as well as fear prevented him from doing" while in the monastery.
But although he no longer dreads his brethren or his Abbot, he has not yet lost all awe of God.
Reason, some faint echo of which still remains, places this check upon his inclination, and it is not without some hesitation that he enters on his sinful course, and, like a man who is trying to ford a stream, steps rather than runs into the torrent of vice.
CHAPTER XXI
Twelfth degree Habitual sin.
(The opposite of thefirst degree of humility constant abstinence from sin for fear of God. ) But when, by the awful judgment of God, his first offences have been unpunished, the pleasure that he has derived from them is freely repeated, and its repetition engrosses him.
Lust is quickened, reason lulled, and habit becomes bondage.
The wretched man 'is drawn into the abyss of evil, made prisoner to the despotic rule of vice, and so overwhelmed by the whirlpool of his carnal desires that he forgets alike his own reason and the fear of God, and says madly in his heart,
He now, without scruple, puts There is no God.
1 Ps. xiii.
St. Bernard describes more fully the spiritual state of the abandoned sinner in his treatise on ' The Rule and Dispensation '
(C, xiv, sect. 40).
(See above Introd. p. xx.)
DEGREES OF PRIDE
pleasure in the place of law, his mind, his hands and his feet are no longer forbidden to consider, execute and pursue courses that are unlawful
; but whatever comes to his heart, his mouth or his hand, he designs, discusses and carries out, with evil intent, idle utterance, and sinful action.
Just as a righteous man, when he has risen through all the degrees, is able by his habitual goodness to run eagerly and easily to life ; so does the wicked man, who has gone down through the same degrees, in consequence of his evil practice emancipated from the rule of reason and unrestrained by the bridle of fear, hasten undaunted to his death.
There are some in the middle who are wearied and worried who, alternately tortured by the fear of hell, and hindered by longstanding habit, find the descent or ascent hard work.
The first one and the last one alone move quickly and without hindrance.
The latter hastens to death the former to life the one more speedily, the other with greater care.
Love makes the one eager, lust renders the other inert.
The affection of the one, the indifference of the other make botK insensible to toil.
So in the one perfect love, in the other consummate wickedness drives out fear.
Loyalty gives confidence to the one, blindness does the same for the other.
So the twelfth degree.may be called the habit of sinning, because in it the fear of God is lost, and its place is taken by scorn.