"God will not permit you to be tempted beyond your strength."

Beloved in Christ:

There is a strange inconsistency in the make-up of man, at least in modern nan. He will tell you that God is not necessary, that God has no place in our present-day picture of wide—spread chaos; that man can solve all of his problems, economic, moral, and political. In other words, he says that he can accomplish anything he wishes through his own will power and efforts.

And with the same breath he will tell you that people who strive to be religious and virtuous are all hypocrites; that it is impossible for man to lead a good life, to be honest, to be sober, to be pure in thought, word, and deed,

For example, he will lash out at the priesthood and say that priests lead unnatural lives, that either they are hypocrites, or they are inhuman, abnormal, or a bit "teched" in the head. But when he says that, he forgets that he is condemning millions of persons who are not priests or religious and who are living single lives in the world.

In making such charges, the modern man forgets that men of themselves always make a mess of things; he forgets that God is still in His heavens; that God still rules by His providence; that God has called every person to a certain station or vocation in life; and that God will not permit anyone of us to be tempted beyond our strength, as the Holy Spirit tells in the epistle of today’s Mass.

"God will not permit you to be tempted beyond your strength" There is great comfort in knowing that we need not go through life with a fear complex. We believe in God-—let us live accordingly. We know that as long as we live we are going to be tempted. We know that life is a battlefield and our enemy is temptation. All of the saints warn us to be on our guard constantly but never to be fearful that we are going to fall through temptation. St. Ignatius gave us one thought along this line when he said, "If the devil troubles me by the idea of Divine Justice, I think of God’s mercy; if he seeks to lead me to presumption by the idea of mercy, I think of God's justice.

One class of temptations which a large number of people experience in life are impure thoughts In fighting this kind of temptations, there is an important lesson to be learned in this incident in the life of a young man. He went to a priest and said to him: "Father, I am constantly tormented with bad thoughts; tell me the best means of putting them away." "My son," said the priest, "if your head were made of glass, so that everyone could see these thoughts, how long would you keep them in your mind?" "Oh! I would put them away instantly for I would be filled with shame if anyone knew that I was thinking about them." "God sees every one of your thoughts more clearly than if they were covered by thin transparent glass," said, the priest, "therefore, when these thoughts come to your mind, say to yourself, ‘God sees me,’ and immediately they will leave you."

The Holy Spirit has told us this: "God is not far from every one of us, for in Him we live, and move, and have our being." This practice of remembering that we are always in God’s presence is one of the greatest helps to a Christian in overcoming temptation. When St. Thomas Aquinas was dying, one of his brethren in religion asked him to give him a rule which he might follow, so that he might never offend God. St. Thomas answered: "My brother, if you keep yourself always in the presence of God, and remember that He is always seeing you, you will never lose His love by yielding to sin."

"God is faithful" and will not permit us to be tempted beyond our strength. There is joy in combat and in conquering. Let us remember that a good pilot proves himself in a tempest; a good soldier on the battlefield; a good Christian in temptation.