THE VIRTUES OF ASCETICISM
‘And the child grew, and wared strong in spirit.’
The words refer to the Baptist, who is set before us as an example of the ascetic, self-sacrificing, self-subduing life, and of the virtues that belong to it. The first, and perhaps the chief of these, is spiritual strength. He ‘waxed strong in spirit.’
I. For want of this power of self-control and self-mastery great numbers of persons lead—
(a) Vague and almost useless lives. They may have good intentions and even great powers, but the good intentions come to nothing, and the great powers are not applied perseveringly to any good end, because they have no rule over themselves. Their will is not supreme over their actions. They act from impulse, not from reason.
(b) Sinful lives. They see the better course and follow the worse. They sin and repent, and sin again in the very same way, and so on, making no progress in spiritual things, getting no higher, nor rising above the same round of temptation and fall. They see a perfection—a saintliness of character—whose glory and beauty they willingly acknowledge, but which they hardly even try to reach. They willingly take the lower road, because it is broad and easy and pleasant, whilst the Saviour beckons them to the higher. Why is it this moral paralysis has affected them? Where is the root of the evil? It is because of the want of hardness and self-mastery in their religion.
II. Divine power.—Sin arose from the idea instilled into the soul by a tempter from without that man should be self-centred—his own standard of right and wrong—‘that ye shall be as gods’ said the tempter to Eve. Now in the degree in which we take back again the Divine Will instead of our own wills as the standard and rule of our actions, we really destroy sin in our souls. And without ‘strength of spirit,’ that is, without self-mastery and ascetic strictness over ourselves, we are powerless to do this. A soul without asceticism is as an army without discipline, which is more formidable to itself than to the enemy.