So gross a misunderstanding of Christianity could never have come into being if this philosopher had ever considered the meaning of self-denial in Christian experience. Christianity is above all a social religion and ours is a communal hope for a communal salvation. Far from being an opium, Christianity requires the vision and the strength to measure values and to hierarchize them according to their objective dignity. It is a religion for the strong; the kingdom of heaven suffereth violence and the violent bear it away. The true disciples of Jesus have lived fully and have died fully. They have not been compromisers, and because they have not, they have fulfilled even their human destinies in the supreme fashion. It is not the timid and the mediocre souls who bear the name of Christian most naturally, but those who have fought with tenacity and courage the great battle on the lasting front of egotism and selfishness. These were aware that a man finds his life by losing it and that even in the natural order "spirit" or "person" has been defined as a capacity for self-donation and for self-transcendence. Nature reflects grace in this law of self-donation for self-fulfillment. Man becomes himself fully by donating himself fully to another. But such a donation is made up of a multitude of little fidelities day by day.

Henri Bergson has said that we are living in an aphrodisiac civilization. It is certainly evident to the most casual observer of our American scene that the search for pleasure has become dominant in our culture. Against such a trend the Christian is called upon to take a decisive stand and to witness the superiority of values higher than pleasure. "Always bearing about in our bodies the mortification of Jesus, that the life also of Jesus may be made manifest in our bodies." The glory of the Christian is "the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, through which the world stands crucified to me, and I to the world."

The Christian life that is not marked by self-denial and mortification is a life at opposition with itself and doomed to dissatisfaction and unhappiness. It could not be otherwise. Mediocrity does not satisfy. A life marked by fear of sacrifice gradually assumes a disunified aspect. It becomes a dialectic of giving and refusing; contradictory choices alternate; life then becomes structured by an unhealthy discontinuity and inconsistency. A life parcelled out between the finite and the Infinite, between creatures and God, between flesh and spirit becomes a pale parody of the Christian life. The individual who wishes to be neither hot nor cold but comfortably tepid, installed in a quasi-automatic routine of religious life, is fated for disunity. To retreat before anticipated sacrifice is to ignore the heroic implications of the Christian life.

Grace and the cross have an affinity for one another which cannot be denied. Our humanism is a humanism that is crucified. Jesus, the source of grace, is typically represented on the cross; from the cross springs the new nature that elevates and heals. We are "more marvelously re-made" to be sure, but "the Author and Finisher of our faith" was crucified. Holiness is progressive identification with Christ, and if it is to be redemptive we must remember that redemption involves the payment of a price.

It is in this perspective of our vocation to holiness and progress in life that we must regard the fundamental law of Christian asceticism: progress in life through death to selfishness, progress in charity through self-denial. It is from this point of view that we must honestly reflect upon our devotion to comfort, to pleasure, to self-satisfaction and self-indulgence.

It is, no doubt, a personal matter for each of us to appraise his own life. Yet as we do so, which of us would not find poignant the words of a great Catholic layman, Francois Mauriac, who once wrote: "We have spent our lives forming attachments, that is the truth of the matter-and there would be nothing extraordinary or scandalous about this if we did not at the same time spend our lives acknowledging a crucified God who asks His disciples to leave everything and take up His cross to follow Him."