The Nucleus of Evil Character

é His heart gathereth iniquity to itself.”,- — Psa.m xli. 6.

THE way to gather a huge snowball is to make a little one, and then roll it along, and it gains bulk and strength as it is rolled. It makes increase in its goings. The way to leaven a bowl of meal is to begin with a bit of leaven, and it will do all the rest. The

momentous thing is to have a nucleus, and the nucleus will gather things which are congenial to its own nature. Like unto like — that is the law of life. Begin with a little, and the little organises its own increase. It gathers its kindred unto itself.

And all this is true of sin. One particular mode of sin can be a nucleus round which gathers a sinful life. It draws to itself strength and increase, and its putrid presence sends tainted influence into all life’s concerns,

A little corruption in a kitchen can touch all the food with defilement. One vice can pollute a soul. (It is very significant that in Dante’s Inferno each soul is punished for one type of sm. Some are punished for avarice, some for gluttony, some for envy, some for hatred. One particular sin has ascendancy, and it meets with a corresponding judgment. But Dante does not teach that a particular sin can stand aloof in the life, like some poisonous weed in an otherwise lovely garden. Dante teaches, as much as any man, that solitary sins do not run through life like single lines of thread. Indeed, life is never a matter of separated lines, like railway lines, which run side by side and never meet. Life is a most intimate and complicated web, and its interwoven meshes are more closely related than anything we can conceive. No man can be avaricious and have only a single thread of defilement running through his soul. His avarice will be creative of other vices; it will call them, and enlist them in its service, as surely as a cesspool calls the wandering flies and sends them to carry its plague over wider fields. A glutton is not a man of a single vice, like a country that has only a single hill towering above the plain. There will be other peaks of vice, and together they will constitute a mountain range of viciousness. And these other heights will be gathered around the central height of gluttony, and will lean on it like lesser hills upon the central strength.

That is surely Dante’s meaning. The single sin is the organising nucleus, and it gathers to itself a kindred character. No man ever rests contented with a single sin; the sin becomes a host, and yet the predominant sin is the destructive presence by which the soul is ultimately poisoned and destroyed. ‘Sin gathers iniquity unto itself.”’

Therefore it is the high wisdom of life to search out and destroy the tolerated vice. Make a lynx-eyed search for the bit of tainted meat in the larder. Have no mercy on the putrid nucleus which in itself may seem comparatively harmless. ‘‘ Make no provision for the flesh.”” That is to say, do not leave anything hanging about in the life in which a carnal character can find a feast. Be intolerant of every evil which will feed and fatten other evils, Root out the seemingly single vice and you will destroy an entire brood. Root out the bitter weed and you sweeten the whole bed.