The Seven Deadly Sins

THE SEVEN DEADLY SINS The lesson writ in red since first time ran, A hunter hunting down the beast in man That till the chasing out of its last vice, The flesh was fashioned but for sacrifice. GEORGE MEREDITH THE SEVEN DEADLY SINS BY FREDERICK ROGERS A. H. BULLEN 47, GREAT RUSSELL STREET, LONDON, W. C. 1907 TO ARTHUR C. HAYWARD WITH WHOM I HAVE READ MANY BOOKS AND FROM WHOM I HAVE HAD MUCH FRIENDSHIP I DEDICATE THESE PAGES CONTENTS INTRODUCTION LIST OF SINS AND VIRTUES WORKS OF MERCY, SPIRITUAL GIFTS, AND PENITENTIAL PSALMS PAGE CHAPTER I. THE SINS AND THE CHURCH - i CHAPTER II. THE SINS AND RELIGIOUS DRAMA - - n CHAPTER III. THE SINS AND SOCIAL REVOLT - - - 29 CHAPTER IV. THE SINS IN COMMON LIFE 44 CHAPTER V. THE SINS AND THE REFORMATION 62 CHAPTER VI. THE SINS AND THE ELIZABETHANS - - 74 CHAPTER VII. EXEUNT THE SINS ------98 ILLUSTRATIONS PRIDE after Gokzim FRONTISPJECE TO FACE PAGE PRIDE after De Fos g LECHERY l8 ENVY 32 WRATH 42 COVETOUSNESS 77 rQ 5 GLUTTONY SL TH 80 WRATH after Peter BruegM . g AVARICE J 100 INTRODUCTION THE business of literature is the presentation of life, all true literature resolves itself into that. No presentation of life is complete without its sins, and every master of literary art has known it, from the poet King of Israel to Robert Browning. The imagination of the Middle Ages, in many ways more virile and expansive than our own, had a strong grasp of this fact, and realised that it is the sense of fault or error that lies at the root of every forward movement, that there is no real progress unless it is accompanied by a sense of sin. Other terms may be used to describe the dynamic power which has moved societies or individuals from lower ideals tohigher, but if we get beyond words to things, we see the sense of the defective character, the unrealised ideal, always and everywhere as the moving force. To the Catholic Church, touched as it often has been and not always to its detriment, with pagan mysticism, the problem of evil was associated with a mystical number and the succeeding pages are an endeavour to trace the various presentations of the Seven Deadly Sins as they have been given by men of powerful im agination, or profound insight, at different periods in our literary history. If the sins in their mystical enu meration no longer keep the place that they once held in Catholic theology, they nevertheless still represent INTRODUCTION with wonderful accuracy what appear to be perman ent defects in the human character. They express the experience of simpler, more strenuous, and in some ways wiser ages than our own, when men stood closer to the foundation facts of life, and saw its grim and awful shadows where we only see its littleness and meanness. But some of them saw the sunshine as well as the shadow, and in the sunshine found the key to all its problems. As this book is written for ordinary readers who may care about English Literature and English Life, and as it travels over three or four centuries of that literature, I have ventured here and there to modernise the ancient prose and verse. From the standpoint of pure scholarship this is open to criticism. The general reader, I think, will be grateful. With the exception of the passage from the prologue to Chaucers Can terbury Tales which is taken from Charles Cowden Clarke, all the modernising is my own, though I owe a line or two here and there to Professor EdwardArbers version of William Dunbars Dance of the Seven Deadly Sins. I felt very much as if I were committing sacrilege when I laid my hands on Dun bars rugged, but magnificent, poetry, but Time robs us of many things, and Time is among the causes which prevent the general reader from appreciating as scholars can the beauties of William Dunbar. I owe the fullest thanks to Mr. A. H. Bullen, and to the Rev. Father Robert Hugh Benson, of the Catholic Mission, Cambridge, for many valuable criti cisms and suggestions...