One of the greatest, if not the greatest, of the defects of the present time is an inordinate care for temporal and material things. How shall we live? what shall we eat? wherewithal shall we be clothed?—these are the questions which men are all too much exercised about at the present day. We see persons who rise, and cause their children to rise, at a very early hour, and from that time till late at night they are working and toiling. We see men of the world who really injure their health, and perhaps shorten their days, by their close and unflagging attention to business. Why do people act thus? All for the sake of the bread that perisheth, all in order to heap up a few dollars which at best they can keep but for a few years. So great has this thirst for money-making become that we see it even in our young boys. They don't want to stay at school; they don't want to store up learning; by the time they are fourteen or a little older (having nothing in their heads but reading, writing, and a little confused arithmetic) they want to be off to the store, the workshop, or the factory. Why? Because they want to join as soon as possible in the wild-goose chase after the goods of the world. Now, all these classes of persons have to learn "that man liveth not by bread alone." My dear friends, besides that poor body which you work so hard to feed, to clothe, and to please, you have an immortal soul. Body and soul united form what we call man. So, then, you must not act as if you were all body. You cannot do so without peril to your soul. Suppose you were to try an experiment of this kind. You say to yourself: "I will eat nothing; I will have prayers for breakfast, confession for lunch, prayers and devotions for dinner, and meditation on death for supper." Then you try it for a week. What an elegant skeleton you would make for a museum at the end of that time! Yet people treat their souls just in that way. Instead of refreshing it with prayers and devotions, etc., they give it clothes, meat and drink, calculations of stock, calculations of profits, cares of this world, etc., and thus the soul is starved just as the body would be by improper food. So then, dear brethren, don't try "to live by bread alone." You can't do it. Try also to live "by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God"—that is to say, by doing those things which, either by his church or by the interior inspirations of his grace, he wishes you to do. Are you in business, or at work? Very well; take care of your affairs prudently, work faithfully, but remember this is not all. You must also find time to pray, find time for confession and the hearing of holy Mass. Don't leave piety to priests, religious women, and children, but let the men also be seen in the church and at the altar-rail. It is a custom in some places that the men should sit on one side of the church and the women on the other. Don't you think if we tried that plan that the numbers on the men's side would often be rather slim? Why? Because they are out in the world trying to live by "bread alone." O my dear friends! why care so much for the goods of this world? Why lay up so much treasure where rust and moth destroy, and where thieves break through and steal? We cannot take a cent with us when we go, and our poor body, even that which we have pampered so much, must decay and return to dust. Let us, then, this morning make a good resolution, that when the devil comes and tempts us to give ourselves up too much to thoughts about our food, our raiment, and our temporal affairs, we will repulse him with these words: "It is written, 'Man liveth not by bread alone, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God.'"
Rev. Algernon A. Brown.
Sermon XLIII.
Jesus was led by the Spirit into the desert,
to be tempted by the devil.
—St. Matthew iv. 1.
Do you know what the word "tempt" means, my brethren? I have no doubt that you know what it is to be tempted. You know that, as St. James says, "every man is tempted, being drawn away, by his own concupiscence, and allured." You yourselves have often been tempted; your concupiscence—that is, your sinful passions of one kind or another—have often tempted you, allured you, enticed you away from the law of God.
But the word "to tempt" does not mean "to allure" or "to entice." It means "to try." To tempt any one is to try him to see what sort of stuff he is made of; that's the real meaning of the word—just as a gun, for instance, is tried by putting in an overcharge to see if it will burst, though I would not advise any of you to tempt a gun in that way. It is not a very safe experiment.
That is the kind of experiment, though, that the devil is always trying on us. He is not afraid of accidents. If an accident does happen it will not hurt him. It is just what he wants. So he tries us in various ways to find where our weak point is; for he cannot tell without trying. When he succeeds, when we break down under his temptations, he says to himself: "That's good. I hit the right spot that time, I'll try that again." For you see we are not like guns: we can be burst more than once.
Now, the Gospel tells us that our Lord himself was led into the desert to be tempted by the devil; that is, to have the devil experiment on him. This seems strange. What use was it to try him? Did not the devil know that he was God and could not sin?