Sermon XLV.
And that no man over-reach,
nor deceive his brother in business;
because the Lord is the avenger of all such things.
—1 Thessalonians iv. 6.
These words are from the Epistle of to-day, my dear brethren, and are certainly suggestive, or at least should be so, at this season which the church has assigned as a time for examination of conscience and repentance for sin.
The sin which St. Paul warns us against goes, when it is practised in other ways, by worse names than the one which he gives it here. A man meets you on a lonely road and takes your money forcibly from you; what do you call it? You call it robbery. A man enters your house at dead of night and carries off your property; what do you call it? You call it burglary. A man picks your pocket on the street; what do you call it? You call it theft. Well, it is all one and the same thing. All these are various ways of breaking the Seventh Commandment; and what is that? Thou shalt not steal.
And what is it to deceive or over-reach some one else in business? It is just the same thing as these; it is the breaking of this same commandment; it is stealing, just as much as robbery, burglary, and theft are, only it does not go by so bad a name, and is not so likely to be punished by the laws of the land. And what do I mean by this over-reaching or deceiving? I mean selling goods under false pretences for more than they are really worth; using false weights or measures; evading in one way and another the payment of one's just debts; taking advantage of one's neighbor's difficulties to make an undue profit for one's self; in short, all the many ways in which men turn a dishonest penny or dollar; in which they get rich by trickery and injustice. All these are stealing, just as bad and a great deal more dishonorable than robbery, burglary, or theft, because not attended with so much risk to the person who is guilty of them.
Now, it seems to me that this sin of cheating—for that is the bad name such sharp practices ought to go by, though they often do not—is a most strange and unaccountable one; much more so than those other kinds of stealing. The man who breaks into your house or who picks your pocket is generally one who is pretty badly off, and who needs what he takes more than the people do from whom he takes it. You do not expect to find rich men setting up as burglars or pickpockets. It is true, sometimes you do find people who have a passion for stealing things when they have plenty of money to buy them; but that is commonly considered to be a special kind of insanity, and they have a name made on purpose for it; they call it "kleptomania." The people who do this are supposed to be crazy on this particular point; but is it not really just the same thing for a man who has enough and to spare to be trying to cheat his neighbor? Such a man, it would seem, must be crazy too.
And there is another way in which cheating is a strange thing, and especially in a Catholic. For every Catholic at least must know that if he tries to cheat he himself gets cheated worse than the people he is trying to impose on. For he gets himself into a very bad position. He has got to do one of two things. One is to restore, as far as possible, what he has cheated other people out of; and that is a very hard thing to do sometimes—much harder than it would have been to have left cheating alone. But hard as this is, the other is much harder. For the other thing is to go to hell; to be banished from God for ever; to pay for all eternity the debt which he would not pay here.
Do not, then, my brethren, get yourselves into this position. But if you are in it do the first of these two things. Restore your ill-gotten goods. Do it now; not put it off till you come to die. It will cost you a struggle then as well as now; and even if you try to do it then, it is doubtful if those who come after you will carry out your wishes. A purpose to restore which is put off till a time when you cannot be sure of carrying it out is rather a weak bridge on which to pass to eternal life. Remember now what you will Wish at the hour of death to have remembered; remember those words of our Lord: "What doth it profit a man, if he gain the whole world and suffer the loss of his own soul?"
Sermon XLVI.
Those of you, my brethren, who are keeping Lent as it should be kept are beginning by this time, if I am not mistaken, to think that it is a pretty long and tedious season. Fasting and abstinence, giving up many worldly amusements, getting up early in the morning and going to Mass as so many of you do, and other such things, get to be rather tiresome to the natural man after a few days; and I have no doubt you are quite glad that Lent does not last the whole year, and are looking forward to the time when it will be over. I have always noticed that there were not many at Mass in Easter week, and there are very few, I imagine, who fast or abstain much then.
And perhaps you are even inclined to say: "What ever did the church get up Lent for at all? Certainly we could be good Christians without it, or save our souls, at any rate." But when you come to think of it you know well enough why Lent was instituted. You know that we cannot save our souls without abstaining from sin, and that we shall not be likely to abstain from sin unless we abstain sometimes also from what is not sinful. You know also that we cannot get to heaven without doing penance for our sins, and that it is better to do penance here than in purgatory. And you know, too, that most people will not abstain much or do much penance beyond what the church commands; so you know why the church got up Lent.
She did it that we might get to heaven sooner and more surely. That ought to be our encouragement, then, in it, that every good Lent brings us a good deal nearer to heaven; that heaven is the reward of penance and mortification. And it is partly to keep this before our minds that the church tells us in to-day's Gospel the story of our Lord's transfiguration: how he took Peter and James and John up with him on Mount Thabor, and there appeared to them in his glory; and filled their hearts with renewed courage and confidence in him, and with a firm belief that it was worth their while to follow him, even if they had to sleep out at night, and not get much to eat, and suffer in many ways—that it was worth while for the sake of the good time coming, of which his glory was a promise, though they did not know just when or what it would be.