Reader, what think you? Was he successful?
APHORISMS.
NO. II.
One may effect an absolute insurance against all real evil by the adoption of a single rule, i. e., never to do anything against conscience. This must be applied in our treatment of ourselves, in body and mind—especially the former; because there we are most apt to fail. It must be kept strictly toward the soul, in view of its endless welfare, and in all our relations to God and man. This, I admit, may not save us from the invasions of apparent ill; but from the entire reality of evil, the security thus furnished is absolute. Conscience is the voice of God in the soul; and no one truly obeying this voice will meet with permanent harm. This rule, let us further observe, is most needed where it is least likely to be regarded, i. e., in circumstances where the voice of conscience is not so decided as in the case of temptations to palpable vice. Our danger is often greatest, where we have to resist only an obscure sense of right and wrong, in seeking the lower gratifications of life. So much the more scrupulous must we there be.
BENEDICT OF NURSIA AND THE ORDER OF THE BENEDICTINES.
Benedict of Nursia, the founder of the celebrated order which bears his name, gave to the Western monasticism a fixed and permanent form, and thus carried it far above the Eastern with its imperfect attempts at organization, and made it exceedingly profitable to the practical, and incidentally also to the literary interests of the Catholic Church. He holds, therefore, the dignity of patriarch of the Western monks. He has furnished a remarkable instance of the incalculable influence which a simple but judicious moral rule of life may exercise on many centuries.
Benedict was born of the illustrious house of Anicius at Nursia (now Norcia), in Umbria, about the year 480, at the time when the political and social state of Europe was distracted and dismembered, and literature, morals, and religion seemed to be doomed to irremediable ruin. He studied in Rome, but so early as his fifteenth year he fled from the corrupt society of his fellow students, and spent three years in seclusion in a dark, narrow, and almost inaccessible grotto at Subiaco.[5] A neighboring monk, Romanus, furnished him from time to time his scanty food, letting it down by a cord, with a little bell, the sound of which announced to him the loaf of bread. He there passed through the usual anchoretic battles with demons, and by prayer and ascetic exercise attained a rare power over nature. At one time, Pope Gregory tells us, the allurements of voluptuousness so strongly tempted his imagination that he was on the point of leaving his retreat in pursuit of a beautiful woman of previous acquaintance; but summoning up his courage, he took off his vestment of skins, and rolled himself naked on thorns and briers near his cave, until the impure fire of sensual passion was forever extinguished. Seven centuries later, St. Francis of Assisi planted on that spiritual battle field two rose trees, which grew and survived the Benedictine thorns and briers. He gradually became known, and was at first taken for a wild beast by the surrounding shepherds, but afterward reverenced as a saint.