It is impossible to say to what this vice will not lead, or to enumerate the crimes that follow in its wake.  The first and most natural consequence is to create a distaste and aversion for prayer, piety, devotion, religion and God; and this is God’s most terrible curse on the vice, for it puts beyond reach of the unfortunate sinner the only remedy that could save him.

But if God’s justice is so rigorous toward the wanton, His mercy is never so great as toward those who need it most, who desire it and ask it.  The most touching episodes in the Gospels are those in which Christ opened wide the arms of His charity to sinful but repentant creatures, and lifted them out of their iniquity.  That same charity and power to shrive, uplift and strengthen resides to-day, in all its plenitude, in the Church which is the continuation of Christ.  Where there is a will there is a way.  The will is the sinner’s; the way is in prayer and the sacraments.

CHAPTER XII.  ANGER.

Never say, when you are angry, that you are mad; it makes you appear much worse than you really are, for only dogs get mad.  The rabies in a human being is a most unnatural and ignoble thing.  Yet common parlance likens anger to it.

It is safe to say that no one has yet been born that never yielded, more or less, to the sway of this passion.  Everybody gets angry.  The child sulks, the little girl calls names and makes faces, the boy fights and throws stones; the maiden waxes huffy, spiteful, and won’t speak, and the irascible male fumes, rages, and says and does things that become him not in the least.  Even pious folks have their tiffs and tilts.  All flesh is frail, and anger has an easy time of it; not because this passion is so powerful, but because it is insidious and passes for a harmless little thing in its ordinary disguise.  And yet all wrath does not manifest itself thus exteriorly.  Still waters are deepest.  An imperturbable countenance may mask a very inferno of wrath and hatred.

To hear us talk, there is no fault in all this, the greater part of the time.  It is a soothing tonic to our conscience after a fit of rage, to lay all the blame on a defect of character or a naturally bad temper.  If fault there is, it is anybody’s but our own.  We recall the fact that patience is a virtue that has its limits, and mention things that we solemnly aver would try the enduring powers of the beatified on their thrones in heaven.  Some, at a loss otherwise to account for it, protest that a particular devil got hold of them and made resistance impossible.

But it was not a devil at all.  It was a little volcano, or better, a little powder magazine hidden away somewhere in the heart.  The imp Pride had its head out looking for a caress, when it received a rebuff instead.  Hastily disappearing within, it spat fire right and left, and the explosion followed, proportionate in energy and destructive power to the quantity of pent-up self-love that served as a charge.  Once the mine is fired, in the confusion and disorder that follow, vengeance stalks forth in quest of the miscreant that did the wrong.