Page:The Great Encyclical Letters of Pope Leo XIII.djvu/531



THE MOST HOLY EUCHARIST. 525

it. For these pleasures, at the present day, an insatiable appetite rages, infecting all classes as with an infectious disease, even from tender years. Yet even for so terrible an evil there is a remedy close at hand in the divine Eu- charist. For in the first place it puts a check on lust by increasing charity, according to the words of St. Augus- tine, who says, speaking of charity: "As it grows, lust diminishes; when it reaches perfection, lust is no more." * Moreover the most chaste flesh of Jesus keeps down the rebellion of our flesh, as St. Cyril of Alexandria taught, "For Christ abiding in us lulls to sleep the law of the flesh which rages in our members." ^ Then, too, the special and most pleasant fruit of the Eucharist is that which is signified in the words of the prophet: What is the good thing of Him, that is, of Christ, and what is His beautiful thing, but the corn of the elect and the wine that engendereth virgins,^ producing, in other words, that flower and fruit- age of a strong and constant purpose of virginity which, even in an age enervated by luxury, is daily multiplied and spread abroad in the Catholic Church, with those advantages to religion and to human society, wherever it is found, which are plain to see.

To this it must be added that by this same Sacrament our hope of everlasting blessedness, based on our trust in the divine assistance, is wonderfully strengthened. For the edge of that longing for happiness which is so deeply rooted in the hearts of all men from their birth is whetted even more and more by the experience of the deceitfulness of earthly goods, by the unjust violence of \\icked men, and by all those other aSlictions to which mind and body are subject. Now the venerable Sacra- ment of the Eucharist is both the source and the pledge of blessedness and of glory, and this, not for the soul alone, but for the body also. For it enriches the soul

' De diversis qusestionibus, Ixxxiii. q. 36. ^ Lib. iv., c. ii., in Joan. vi. 57. 3 Zach. ix. 17.