Page:Essays on Catholicism, Liberalism, and Socialism.djvu/221

of the snow. The condition in which our nature is placed is a grave evil, and our sins are a still greater evil; but between the deformity peculiar to sin and that peculiar to the nature of man, there exists a secret connection and a certain proportion which did not exist between sin and the nature of the first man. Extreme beauty united in the same man to extreme ugliness is monstrous; and two forms of ugliness combined are, in comparison to it, beautiful. For then, in place of their ugliness being heightened by contrast, it is to some extent modified by the harmony which results from their resemblance. This is, doubtless, the reason why physical ugliness always seems to diminish with years. It appears to be better adapted to old age, and harmonizes with its wrinkles. On the contrary, nothing can be more sad, nor more repulsive, than the stamp of old age upon an angelic face, or than ugliness in the bloom of life. Those women who, having once been beautiful, preserve in the decline of life the vestiges of their former loveliness, have always appeared to me to be horrible-they always remind me of the magnitude of that first sin, in consequence of which we find united that which God designed should remain separated. No! God has not made beauty for old age, nor old age for beauty. Lucifer was the only angel, and Adam the only man who united in themselves all the horrors of decrepitude and ugliness joined to all the freshness of youth and the splendor of beauty.