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that the successful man needs to be a very spiritually watchful man. He
is quite apt to think that he may take all sorts of liberties with the
laws of God. There are, no doubt, evident dangers to the unsuccessful
man, but the Holy Scriptures have not thought it worth while to spend
much time in denouncing him. It has a good deal to say of the danger,
not so much of wealth, as of prosperity in general: "Behold, this was
the iniquity of thy sister Sodom, pride, fullness of bread, and
prosperous ease were in her." When we find ourselves in a satisfied and
comfortable home life, so comfortable that we find it difficult to get
up to a week-day Mass, and disinclined to go out to a service after
dinner, we need watching.

And the best watchman is oneself; and the best method of
self-examination is by the Cross. Is there any sense in which we can be
said to be following our Lord on the Sorrowful Way? Have we taken up the
Cross to go after Him, or are we assuming that we can just as well drift
along with the crowd of those who only look on? We all need from time to
time to consider the Catholic teaching as to mortification and
self-discipline. I am quite aware that to insist on this is not the way
of popularity, but nevertheless I learned a long time ago that about the
only way that a priest can take if he wishes to be saved is the way of
unpopularity. And therefore I am going to insist that the practice of
rigorous self-discipline is essential to any healthy Christian life. We
cannot dispense ourselves from this, for the mere fact that we are
dispensing ourselves is the proof that we need that upon which we are
turning our back. Briefly, what I mean is that the assumption of the
Cross by a Christian means that he is taking into his life, voluntarily,
personal acts of self-sacrifice which he offers to our Lord as the
evidence and the means of his own Cross-bearing.

The unruliness of our nature can only be kept in order by continual acts
of self-discipline. We, no doubt, recognise the need of the discipline
of the passions, but our theory, so far as we can be said to have one,
would seem to be that the discipline of the passions means resistence to
special temptations as they arise. We may no doubt sin through the
passions, and therefore we need a minimum of watchfulness to meet
temptations which come our way. I submit that such a way of conducting
life is quite sufficient to account for the vast amount of failure we
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