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Why the Cross?
Jesus Christ’s death on the Cross is the central act of human existence which links every act of suffering, self-giving, or self-denial with God Himself. The author, a priest who wrote on the eve of World War II, forcefully makes the connection between the Crucifixion as the horrible expiation for all sins and the need for ordinary faithful to willingly embrace suffering in its various forms to find their way to God. The author shows how the problem of obtaining happiness is intrinsically bound up with the problem of pain. Sacrifices undertaken for faith do not make one unhappy, if that faith is made a reality in the constant and ordinary activities of life. “Too many use their religion as medicine and not as food,” Leen writes. “They make of it a remedy for evil and not a means to good.”
- GenresTheology
336 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1938
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About the author
Edward Leen
20 books5 followersFr. Edward Leen, Holy Ghost Father, was a master scholar of dogmatic and ascetical theology of the early twentieth century.
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July 6, 2021***This version is out of print. To get your hands on a version in print, click here: https://www.truerestoration.org/press... ***
It is difficult to understate what a pleasure it is to read Fr. Leen's writing. This is only the first of his I have read and I am sorry I waited so long to read one. He has the ability to take parables, teachings, quotes that you are intimately familiar with and examine them in a way that shows you haven't even begun to penetrate their mysteries. Every page was a pleasure to read and I look forward to returning to it multiple times in the future.
"They understood Christianity to be what it actually is, a divinely fashioned instrument, made for the express purpose of transforming human nature." (p. 3)
"For though the Church's wisdom is primarily in the domain of things of the world to come, yet she is wise, too, with regard to the things of the world that is. She is not for the world and yet she is able and even ready to act as if she were equipped specially to procure the temporal good of men." (p. 8)
"If there be a difference between former and modern times it lies only in this, that the incessant endeavour, to which men feel themselves committed, tends more and more to express itself in violent and rapid motion, in which they hurl themselves from one end of the earth to the other with vertiginous speed." (p. 16)
"[T]heir movement has become but a feverish tossing to and fro in the delirium of a mortal sickness." (p. 22)
"To a thoughtful spirit gazing on our planet from outside, the world would, in a great measure, appear like a huge cage in which men pace to and fro with the futile restlessness of wild animals behind their bars." (p. 23)
(in regards to Catholics) "In their views, their aims, their worldly ambitions, their judgments, their tastes, their appreciations, their amusements, their pursuits, they do not present any striking contrast to those who profess a false religion or no religion at all." (p. 26)
"For the considerable portion of them there is no clear line of demarcation between their way of dealing with the ordinary interests of life, and that of the votaries of this world." (p. 26-27)
"For the most part, though they would not admit, they treat their faith as though it were useful to secure happiness only in the world to come, but not in the world that is." (p. 27)
"The art and literature of that world...is the expression of the soul of unregenerate humanity and of that soul's ideals." (p. 27)
"To live perfectly is to be perfectly happy...Man is blind to this truth because of his inveterate tendency to identify suffering and unhappiness." (p. 30)
"Religion fails them only because the gospel by which they regulate their existence bears a very inadequate resemblance to the original." (p. 45)
"[A] faith which does not seize upon all the deliberate acts of a man's day and invest them with a higher significance...such a faith is not a living one and cannot, in consequence, be a vitalizing one." (p. 46)
"Hence, to believe in Jesus Christ is to subscribe to His entire theory of life and to accept it as our own. It means to make His values ours." (p. 46)
"In a word, to believe in Jesus Christ, is to accept His guiding principle of life, to renounce all theories of the "good life" that are in opposition to His and to submit not only our whole conduct but our judgments, as well, to His ruling." (p. 47)
(regarding Christ) "He is very tender towards the imperfect, but relentless towards imperfection." (p. 48)
"The Christian is not free to leave aside the difficult injunctions of the Law and confine his efforts to those he finds easier to fulfill." (p. 49)
"His object is to furnish men with the means of becoming perfect and not merely with the means of escaping the painful consequence of being imperfect." (p. 52)
"Too many use their religion as medicine and not as food." (p. 52)
"The gospel is not a record of a more or less successful philanthropic mission." (p. 55)
"To Christians, who persist in thinking that the function of Christianity is to provide men with good things and banish from their life evil things - understanding by good and evil what appear such to fallen nature - life will speedily prove unintelligible." (p. 55)
"That Jesus, in His power and goodness, did not put an end to all human suffering shows that, in His eyes, suffering is not the real source of human unhappiness." (p. 56)
"Jesus strove to make (the Jews) understand that the real obstacle to their happiness was not presented by the irksome external conditions of social and political life under which they chafed, but by their erroneous views on the fundamental issues of life itself." (p. 66)
"Man is a being instinctively religious, but he tends to seek a religion that will allow him to gratify the instincts of his fallen nature...and yet secure him the favor of God." (p. 66)
"'What must we do to be saved,' is a question that shows an incomprehension of the meaning and conditions of salvation.'" (p. 67)
"This real, though incomplete happiness, is offered to all men: it will be experienced by them in proportion to the degree in which they respond to the designs of the Savior and accept the conditions He traces for the vision of God here and hereafter." (p. 85)
"[T]he Cross is not meant to be an accidental or a violent intrusion into life...(it is) what stands between us and God." (p. 93)
"Man is persuaded that were suffering removed from his life, he would be happy." (p. 93)
"Now to come to know God is not merely to grow in knowledge of His attributes, it is to become intimate with Him, to become conversant with His ways, and to enter into His views." (p. 108)
"The creature is said to serve God, but nothing can accrue to God from such service." (p. 109)
"God demands nothing; all that He asks is that man should be content to receive and to set up no barriers against what God is only too anxious to give." (p. 120)
"When he (man) turns his back on goods that are imperishable and divine, he develops a fatal tendency towards such as yield a satisfaction that is transient and ephemeral." (p. 150)
"Sanctifying grace is given back by the merits of Christ, but not the preternatural gifts." (p. 156)
(regarding man) "He can do great, and even heroic things, for human considerations, but has to overcome a strong resistance in his nature to do even a small thing out of regard for God." (p. 157)
"Men can do much for a corruptible crown, but are reluctant to do even a little for an incorruptible one." (p. 157)
"Man, in his perversity, never abandons the hope of scaling the heavens by force of arm and might of intellect." (p. 163)
"Few are they who are unmoved by what is said or thought of them by their fellows." (p. 166)
"In the praises of others man seeks to find the assurance that his inner conviction deny him." (p. 166)
"Until this fatal tendency away from God is conquered, grace cannot develop freely and exercise effective control over man's deliberate life." (p. 170)
"He (man) sighs for the impassibility of Eden though not for the intimate union with his Maker that he enjoyed there. He longs for the earthly paradise, but does not hunger for God." (p. 175)
"To the three concupiscences Jesus opposes the appeal of His Poverty, Chastity and Humble Obedience to God." (p. 181)
"Though reasons for the divine decision are hidden from us, we can be certain that the mode actually chosen for redeeming man was one that accords perfectly with the wisdom of God and is most expedient for the salvation of man." (p. 194)
"He (Christ) had to reveal God to man: He had, as well, to reveal man to himself." (p. 196)
"Men...find it difficult to live as if the present life meant something and yet to live as if it meant nothing." (p. 196)
"[M]an chafes instinctively against limitation. He is ever dissatisfied with what he is and has a consuming ambition 'to add a cubit to his stature.'" (p. 202)
"Real wealth and true distinction, He insisted, could be secured even already in this world, if only men knew on which side to look for them." (p. 205)
"The poverty and hardship of the human life of the Redeemer is but little attractive to self-indulgent fallen nature." (p. 210)
"[T]he man who has all that the world eagerly seeks, but without God, has nothing, and...he who finds God, though he want all else, possesses everything." (p. 211)
"Our lives lose direction the moment they cease to be a voyage for the discovery of God." (p. 216)
"It is literally true that in the divine adventure one must not only risk one's life, one must lose it." (p. 219)
"Happiness is promised to those who have the faith to embrace what appears to be the very negation of happiness." (p. 236)
"A day will come when time will be no more." (p. 242)
"Man cannot reconcile himself to the idea that he is made for a happiness deferred." (p. 243)
"[M]an will not be convinced that happiness of some kind or other is an unattainable ideal here below." (p. 243)
"[I]t is an error to judge that happiness is synonymous with pleasure, unhappiness with pain." (p. 245)
"Christianity is not a morbid cult of pain and distress and squalor and misery. Its native spirit is joyous." (p. 250)
"Christ does not ask us 'to lose our life' as if the agony to be endured in that death were put before us as an object desirable in itself." (p. 250)
"You cannot enter into this experience (happiness) unless your souls are rendered apt for it. This aptitude is acquired at the cost of purifying suffering." (p. 251)
"The absence of suffering, then, does not make a man happy." (p. 252)
"Man is wrought to perfection by thought and by love." (p. 252)
"It is not Christ's life as a comprehensor, but His life as a viator that presents us with the ideal towards which we are to direct our efforts." (p. 260)
"God was ever the subject of His thoughts. That object drew His heart like a magnet at all times." (p. 279)
"Humility is...knowing one's position in the scheme of things and abiding in that position." (p. 293)
"He knew that His justice would not be esteemed and His sinlessness would not be revered." (p. 298)
"...(man's) tendency to reject God unless He can be contracted to fit into man's petty rational preconceptions and his purblind notions of the congruous in things." (p. 301)
"The triumph of Palm Sunday was more apparent than real. The Jews never truly received Christ because their religious ideas remained in radical opposition to His." (p. 312)
"They honored Him, not for what He truly was, but for what their imaginations made Him." (p. 314)
"On that day (Good Friday) it precipitated a situation in its reversal of all that was normal in things. The chosen people of God reject the Son of the God they worshipped, with a worship almost fanatical in its intensity. Not only do they reject Him, but they show a preference for a robber and a murderer. The tragic irony reaches a climax when there is seen the pagan, the worshipper of false Gods, pleading with the worshippers of the true God, to spare the life of Him Whom they worshipped! And this pleading is urged at the time when the followers of the true God were gathered together for His worship on the most solemn festival of the Jewish calendar." (p. 316)
"Christ, though guiltless, is responsible, in virtue of His acceptance of the divine decree of mystic solidarity between Him and the race, for the guilt of mankind." (p. 319)
"This flesh, holy in itself, is filled, penetrated, covered, clothed as it were within and without, with all the loathsomeness of our sins, with a mass of wickedness which floods it like a deluge and overwhelms it." (p. 328)
"He clothed Himself with malediction as with a garment and it entered like water into His entrails and like oil into all His bones." (p. 330)
"The flight of the disciples was like a signal that unloosed the malignant powers of earth and hell on the unprotected humanity of the Redeemer." (p. 331)
"God regulates the darkness as well as the light." (p. 332)
"The indifferent just glanced at Him, and hurried on their way preoccupied by their own concerns." (p. 339)
"Calvary is more easily understood by setting it over in contrast with Eden." (p. 359)
"The obedience of Calvary obliterated the disobedience of Eden." (p. 360)
"Love is, in final account, the great force in life, for love alone can inspire that sacrifice which is the price of unwavering fidelity to the Lord." (p. 362)
It is difficult to understate what a pleasure it is to read Fr. Leen's writing. This is only the first of his I have read and I am sorry I waited so long to read one. He has the ability to take parables, teachings, quotes that you are intimately familiar with and examine them in a way that shows you haven't even begun to penetrate their mysteries. Every page was a pleasure to read and I look forward to returning to it multiple times in the future.
"They understood Christianity to be what it actually is, a divinely fashioned instrument, made for the express purpose of transforming human nature." (p. 3)
"For though the Church's wisdom is primarily in the domain of things of the world to come, yet she is wise, too, with regard to the things of the world that is. She is not for the world and yet she is able and even ready to act as if she were equipped specially to procure the temporal good of men." (p. 8)
"If there be a difference between former and modern times it lies only in this, that the incessant endeavour, to which men feel themselves committed, tends more and more to express itself in violent and rapid motion, in which they hurl themselves from one end of the earth to the other with vertiginous speed." (p. 16)
"[T]heir movement has become but a feverish tossing to and fro in the delirium of a mortal sickness." (p. 22)
"To a thoughtful spirit gazing on our planet from outside, the world would, in a great measure, appear like a huge cage in which men pace to and fro with the futile restlessness of wild animals behind their bars." (p. 23)
(in regards to Catholics) "In their views, their aims, their worldly ambitions, their judgments, their tastes, their appreciations, their amusements, their pursuits, they do not present any striking contrast to those who profess a false religion or no religion at all." (p. 26)
"For the considerable portion of them there is no clear line of demarcation between their way of dealing with the ordinary interests of life, and that of the votaries of this world." (p. 26-27)
"For the most part, though they would not admit, they treat their faith as though it were useful to secure happiness only in the world to come, but not in the world that is." (p. 27)
"The art and literature of that world...is the expression of the soul of unregenerate humanity and of that soul's ideals." (p. 27)
"To live perfectly is to be perfectly happy...Man is blind to this truth because of his inveterate tendency to identify suffering and unhappiness." (p. 30)
"Religion fails them only because the gospel by which they regulate their existence bears a very inadequate resemblance to the original." (p. 45)
"[A] faith which does not seize upon all the deliberate acts of a man's day and invest them with a higher significance...such a faith is not a living one and cannot, in consequence, be a vitalizing one." (p. 46)
"Hence, to believe in Jesus Christ is to subscribe to His entire theory of life and to accept it as our own. It means to make His values ours." (p. 46)
"In a word, to believe in Jesus Christ, is to accept His guiding principle of life, to renounce all theories of the "good life" that are in opposition to His and to submit not only our whole conduct but our judgments, as well, to His ruling." (p. 47)
(regarding Christ) "He is very tender towards the imperfect, but relentless towards imperfection." (p. 48)
"The Christian is not free to leave aside the difficult injunctions of the Law and confine his efforts to those he finds easier to fulfill." (p. 49)
"His object is to furnish men with the means of becoming perfect and not merely with the means of escaping the painful consequence of being imperfect." (p. 52)
"Too many use their religion as medicine and not as food." (p. 52)
"The gospel is not a record of a more or less successful philanthropic mission." (p. 55)
"To Christians, who persist in thinking that the function of Christianity is to provide men with good things and banish from their life evil things - understanding by good and evil what appear such to fallen nature - life will speedily prove unintelligible." (p. 55)
"That Jesus, in His power and goodness, did not put an end to all human suffering shows that, in His eyes, suffering is not the real source of human unhappiness." (p. 56)
"Jesus strove to make (the Jews) understand that the real obstacle to their happiness was not presented by the irksome external conditions of social and political life under which they chafed, but by their erroneous views on the fundamental issues of life itself." (p. 66)
"Man is a being instinctively religious, but he tends to seek a religion that will allow him to gratify the instincts of his fallen nature...and yet secure him the favor of God." (p. 66)
"'What must we do to be saved,' is a question that shows an incomprehension of the meaning and conditions of salvation.'" (p. 67)
"This real, though incomplete happiness, is offered to all men: it will be experienced by them in proportion to the degree in which they respond to the designs of the Savior and accept the conditions He traces for the vision of God here and hereafter." (p. 85)
"[T]he Cross is not meant to be an accidental or a violent intrusion into life...(it is) what stands between us and God." (p. 93)
"Man is persuaded that were suffering removed from his life, he would be happy." (p. 93)
"Now to come to know God is not merely to grow in knowledge of His attributes, it is to become intimate with Him, to become conversant with His ways, and to enter into His views." (p. 108)
"The creature is said to serve God, but nothing can accrue to God from such service." (p. 109)
"God demands nothing; all that He asks is that man should be content to receive and to set up no barriers against what God is only too anxious to give." (p. 120)
"When he (man) turns his back on goods that are imperishable and divine, he develops a fatal tendency towards such as yield a satisfaction that is transient and ephemeral." (p. 150)
"Sanctifying grace is given back by the merits of Christ, but not the preternatural gifts." (p. 156)
(regarding man) "He can do great, and even heroic things, for human considerations, but has to overcome a strong resistance in his nature to do even a small thing out of regard for God." (p. 157)
"Men can do much for a corruptible crown, but are reluctant to do even a little for an incorruptible one." (p. 157)
"Man, in his perversity, never abandons the hope of scaling the heavens by force of arm and might of intellect." (p. 163)
"Few are they who are unmoved by what is said or thought of them by their fellows." (p. 166)
"In the praises of others man seeks to find the assurance that his inner conviction deny him." (p. 166)
"Until this fatal tendency away from God is conquered, grace cannot develop freely and exercise effective control over man's deliberate life." (p. 170)
"He (man) sighs for the impassibility of Eden though not for the intimate union with his Maker that he enjoyed there. He longs for the earthly paradise, but does not hunger for God." (p. 175)
"To the three concupiscences Jesus opposes the appeal of His Poverty, Chastity and Humble Obedience to God." (p. 181)
"Though reasons for the divine decision are hidden from us, we can be certain that the mode actually chosen for redeeming man was one that accords perfectly with the wisdom of God and is most expedient for the salvation of man." (p. 194)
"He (Christ) had to reveal God to man: He had, as well, to reveal man to himself." (p. 196)
"Men...find it difficult to live as if the present life meant something and yet to live as if it meant nothing." (p. 196)
"[M]an chafes instinctively against limitation. He is ever dissatisfied with what he is and has a consuming ambition 'to add a cubit to his stature.'" (p. 202)
"Real wealth and true distinction, He insisted, could be secured even already in this world, if only men knew on which side to look for them." (p. 205)
"The poverty and hardship of the human life of the Redeemer is but little attractive to self-indulgent fallen nature." (p. 210)
"[T]he man who has all that the world eagerly seeks, but without God, has nothing, and...he who finds God, though he want all else, possesses everything." (p. 211)
"Our lives lose direction the moment they cease to be a voyage for the discovery of God." (p. 216)
"It is literally true that in the divine adventure one must not only risk one's life, one must lose it." (p. 219)
"Happiness is promised to those who have the faith to embrace what appears to be the very negation of happiness." (p. 236)
"A day will come when time will be no more." (p. 242)
"Man cannot reconcile himself to the idea that he is made for a happiness deferred." (p. 243)
"[M]an will not be convinced that happiness of some kind or other is an unattainable ideal here below." (p. 243)
"[I]t is an error to judge that happiness is synonymous with pleasure, unhappiness with pain." (p. 245)
"Christianity is not a morbid cult of pain and distress and squalor and misery. Its native spirit is joyous." (p. 250)
"Christ does not ask us 'to lose our life' as if the agony to be endured in that death were put before us as an object desirable in itself." (p. 250)
"You cannot enter into this experience (happiness) unless your souls are rendered apt for it. This aptitude is acquired at the cost of purifying suffering." (p. 251)
"The absence of suffering, then, does not make a man happy." (p. 252)
"Man is wrought to perfection by thought and by love." (p. 252)
"It is not Christ's life as a comprehensor, but His life as a viator that presents us with the ideal towards which we are to direct our efforts." (p. 260)
"God was ever the subject of His thoughts. That object drew His heart like a magnet at all times." (p. 279)
"Humility is...knowing one's position in the scheme of things and abiding in that position." (p. 293)
"He knew that His justice would not be esteemed and His sinlessness would not be revered." (p. 298)
"...(man's) tendency to reject God unless He can be contracted to fit into man's petty rational preconceptions and his purblind notions of the congruous in things." (p. 301)
"The triumph of Palm Sunday was more apparent than real. The Jews never truly received Christ because their religious ideas remained in radical opposition to His." (p. 312)
"They honored Him, not for what He truly was, but for what their imaginations made Him." (p. 314)
"On that day (Good Friday) it precipitated a situation in its reversal of all that was normal in things. The chosen people of God reject the Son of the God they worshipped, with a worship almost fanatical in its intensity. Not only do they reject Him, but they show a preference for a robber and a murderer. The tragic irony reaches a climax when there is seen the pagan, the worshipper of false Gods, pleading with the worshippers of the true God, to spare the life of Him Whom they worshipped! And this pleading is urged at the time when the followers of the true God were gathered together for His worship on the most solemn festival of the Jewish calendar." (p. 316)
"Christ, though guiltless, is responsible, in virtue of His acceptance of the divine decree of mystic solidarity between Him and the race, for the guilt of mankind." (p. 319)
"This flesh, holy in itself, is filled, penetrated, covered, clothed as it were within and without, with all the loathsomeness of our sins, with a mass of wickedness which floods it like a deluge and overwhelms it." (p. 328)
"He clothed Himself with malediction as with a garment and it entered like water into His entrails and like oil into all His bones." (p. 330)
"The flight of the disciples was like a signal that unloosed the malignant powers of earth and hell on the unprotected humanity of the Redeemer." (p. 331)
"God regulates the darkness as well as the light." (p. 332)
"The indifferent just glanced at Him, and hurried on their way preoccupied by their own concerns." (p. 339)
"Calvary is more easily understood by setting it over in contrast with Eden." (p. 359)
"The obedience of Calvary obliterated the disobedience of Eden." (p. 360)
"Love is, in final account, the great force in life, for love alone can inspire that sacrifice which is the price of unwavering fidelity to the Lord." (p. 362)
February 19, 2008
I read 1933 edition of this book. I understand that it was reprinted. The current publisher of this book removed sections from another book that I read; so, I do not know whether the current edition of this book is the same as the one I read.
I found it interesting that the problems in Fr. Leen's days (disconnect between faith and secular life/no use of faith in aspects other than religion) are the same problems we still have today.
Here is one quote from the book that has stuck with me:
"There is always continuity in God's plan. He could not have meant that the life of man in time and the life of man in eternity should be of two distinct patterns artificially joined together.... As long as man is man, what makes him happy *as man* must always be the same thing essentially. If a rational creature whilst on earth, must live something of the same life or be unhappy. Men cannot be happy in two specifically distinct ways. He is certainly happy in heaven. There is, then, no possibility for him of achieving happiness on earth, unless he can anticipate in time the conditions of eternity."
I found it interesting that the problems in Fr. Leen's days (disconnect between faith and secular life/no use of faith in aspects other than religion) are the same problems we still have today.
Here is one quote from the book that has stuck with me:
"There is always continuity in God's plan. He could not have meant that the life of man in time and the life of man in eternity should be of two distinct patterns artificially joined together.... As long as man is man, what makes him happy *as man* must always be the same thing essentially. If a rational creature whilst on earth, must live something of the same life or be unhappy. Men cannot be happy in two specifically distinct ways. He is certainly happy in heaven. There is, then, no possibility for him of achieving happiness on earth, unless he can anticipate in time the conditions of eternity."
January 5, 2020
An absolutely wonderful book! A beautiful guide to the spiritual life and a detailed explanation of suffering and Providence. Fr. Leen is amazing! Highly recommend!
December 7, 2009
Beautiful book that explains how Man fell from God's grace when he commited the first sin and how Jesus Christ came as the new Adam and restored grace between God and Man again by showing us how to live united to God.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews