Ch. LV. Chastity

O quam pulchra est casta generatio cum claritate! (Oh! how beautiful is the chaste generation with glory).—WIS. iv. 1. THE most beautiful, the most amiable of virtues, the characteristic virtue of the Children of Mary and the most brilliant pearl on their brow, is the virtue of chastity.

May we love this virtue as the Blessed Virgin, our Mother, loves it! May we ever preserve it in all its splendor! To this end let us consider, first, the excellence of chastity, then what is its safeguard.

I. Excellence. The excellence of chastity consists in the ravishing beauty of the virtue and the inestimable advantages it procures.

1st. The Holy Spirit Himself extols chastity in the most exalted terms: How beautiful is the chaste generation with glory: for the memory thereof is immortal: because it is known both with God and with men (Wis. iv. 1).

The Son of God made man has manifested a marked predilection for this virtue; not only did He choose for His Mother the purest of virgins, but He desired that all who were to touch His humanity, or draw near to His sacred person should be pure and virginal. His foster-father, His precursor, His beloved disciple, the priesthood of the new law which He instituted to offer His eucharistic body, all appear before us resplendent in virginal purity. He feedeth among the lilies, says the prophet (Cant. vi. 2). He is that Lamb without stain which St. John beheld on Mount Sion: With him there were an hundred and forty-four thousand, . . . and they sung a new canticle before the throne; no man could say the canticle but those, for they are virgins. These follow the Lamb whithersoever he goeth (Apoc. xiv. 1–4).

This beautiful virtue, then, has a charm which enraptures the heart of God.

3d. Chastity elevates the soul to an incomparable dignity: it makes it the spouse of God. Ah! how joyous will be the nuptials of a soul with such a Spouse.

4th. Chastity elevates man above his nature and makes him like the angels of God (Matt. xxii. 30). The angels, like chaste souls, see God and the things of heaven; they burn with pure flames of charity; they accomplish with promptness, undeterred by any obstacle, all the will of God. . . .

St. Bernard goes so far as to place a chaste man above the angels, because of the courage he must exert to attain a virtue which the angels possess by nature. The latter, he says, are more fortunate in having received a perfect purity; a chaste man has more merit in having sustained the greatest combats.

5th. Chastity makes us fruitful in virtues and good works; . . . . it powerfully helps us to win souls to God. . . .

II. Safeguard of chastity. To preserve intact the virtue of chastity and bring it to its highest perfection we must, 1st, be penetrated with the frailty of man, particularly in this respect. It is in this sense more than any other that we must say: I am man, and there is no human misery into which I may not fall. Were you purer than an angel you are always clothed in corruptible flesh, and a simple imprudence may suffice to plunge you into the mire.

2d. We must love chastity, love it as the most precious of treasures, and add to this love a horror of the contrary sin, and even a horror of all that could lead to impurity.

Impurity is a vice which the tongues of all people call infamous—a dishonorable, debasing vice which degrades man and drags him lower than the brute; a vice which leads its slaves into sacrileges and innumerable sins; a vice of which it is extremely difficult to amend; a vice which induces blindness, hardness, despair, and which ruins the greatest number of souls. . . . Does this suffice to give us a horror of it?

3d. We must fly dangerous occasions—dissolute companions, licentious reading, immoral plays, idleness, intemperance, familiarity with persons of another sex; these are the most usual shoals upon which chastity is wrecked. . . .

4th. We must employ the means; they are summed up in humility, mortification, prayer. These means correspond to the triple symbol of the lily which we find in different parts of the Scriptures: the lily of the valley, the lily among thorns, and the lily in the midst of the fields, where it is inundated with the dew of heaven—an image of grace, which prayers cause to descend in abundance from heaven.

Under the name of prayer we must understand not only assiduous prayer and pious invocations at the time of danger, . . . but also frequenting the sacraments, as well as a tender devotion to the Blessed Virgin and St. Joseph. . . .

By employing these means, after the example of the saints and all good Christians, we shall preserve, like them, the inestimable treasure of purity, and we shall go through this world keeping our souls unspotted from its corruption.