vice is the road to temporal well-being? Yet it is from the hands of the great God that all blessings and goods must come. Without His favorable co-operation not a blade of grass can exist in the field, not a leaf on the tree, not an herb in the garden, not a stone on the mountain. What more contradictory, then, than to maintain that to attain prosperity we must despise and offend Him from whom all goods and graces must come. And if they alone who offend God enjoy wealth, health, and the esteem of their friends, what poor, distressed mortal would not prefer to live in sin, that things might go better with him? If the pious, who serve God with zeal, are to be the only ones to suffer poverty, sickness, and contempt, what rich man would venture to do penance and run the risk of living in misery? But, my dear brethren, that is not the case at all. I maintain quite the contrary: that sin and wickedness is the source from which all the miseries and troubles of life come. The Lord has nothing but woes for the sinner in the mouth of the Prophet Isaias: “Wo to the sinful nation, a people laden with iniquity, a wicked seed, ungracious children.”[1] “Let it not be well with the wicked,” says the Wise Preacher; “neither let his days be prolonged, but as a shadow let them pass away that fear not the face of the Lord.”[2]
But brings on men even temporal misfortune. Did not Saul in olden times gain a royal crown by his virtue and piety and lose it by becoming wicked? If King David ever had to suffer misfortune, it was when he forgot his God and committed the shameful crimes of adultery and murder. When and how did the wonderful good fortune of Solomon begin to decline? Was it not when that king and his successors began to practise idolatry? “As long as they sinned not in the sight of their God it was well with them: for their God hateth iniquity,” so said Achior to Holofernes of the Jewish people; “But as often as beside their own God they worshipped any other they were given to spoil, and to the sword, and to reproach.”[3] So that it is not alone those who lead bad lives who enjoy prosperity, although the world nowadays is apt to have recourse to unjust means to secure it; and the same just God still lives and rules
- ↑ Væ genti peccatrici, populo gravi iniquitate, semini nequam, filiis sceleratis.—Is. i. 4.
- ↑ Non sit bonum impio, nec prolongentur dies ejus, sed quasi umbra transeant qui non timent faciem Domini.—Eccles. viii. 13.
- ↑ Usquedum non peccarent in conspectu Dei sui, erant cum illis bona; Deus enim illorum odit iniquitatem. Quotiescumque autem præter ipsum Deum suum, alterum coluerunt, dati sunt in prædam, et in gladium, et in opprobrium.—Judith v. 21, 18.
