Page:Ploughshare and Pruning-Hook.djvu/31

Rh Yet possession—in the sense of realising each one for himself the wealth and enjoyment which life has to offer—is so deep an instinct, is so knit up with the adventurous and progressive spirit out of which the higher human consciousness is built—that it is useless to turn on man and say to him: "Possess nothing—rid yourself of all joys, of all the delights of the senses and the understanding—so only shall you attain to the heavenly stature." That doctrine has been preached in the past; and the squeals of Manichean hermits in the wilderness, and of monastic contortionists, denying to their senses the very ground upon which they stood, has been its echoing chorus all down the ages. Never were souls more horribly possessed than these fliers from possession; never were men more defeated in their warfare with the thing they spurned. Like a tin tied to a dog's tail the more they ran from it, the more the flesh afflicted them reminding them of its neglected claims. The loveliest and wisest of these mediæval sinners against the life which God had given them was brought by his own gospel of peace to a death-bed repentance which others did not attain to. "Brother ass, I have been too hard upon thee," said St. Francis, turning with compunction at last to his much-wronged body, the one thing to which, in mistaken piety, he had denied either consideration or love. The single greed which ate up and destroyed the life of that lovely