Do not desire at all to be always solitary for you are solitary enough as you are in your religious community at Port-Royal so long as you do speak a little with persons from outside. We have to face the truth that others may be more in innocence and penitence than we. Spiritual peace in the remembrance of our past faults is a great humility very agreeable to God and very able to satisfy him for our sins but our peace must express itself in conversations with innocents and penitents, admiring the first and supporting the others.
God has given you proof by the donation that was made to you without you having solicited it that the best way to receive gifts from God is to not wish for them at all. It teaches us that grace which is the gift of God to men (as money is the gift of men to God) is the only thing we should desire and our desire itself, like the strongest prayer, draws it into the soul.
It seems to me we should take pleasure in dying of hunger rather than asking God for something to nourish our body, or else to ask for food in order to love and to serve still more faithfully the one to whom we owe everything. Whoever serves well should ask for enough to continue but we never serve God well except if we love the poverty of Jesus Christ. On one hand, as a martyr ends and achieves charity during the period of persecution, so on the other hand, it seems to me that to die of hunger is a fitting end during the period of the church at peace.
I find it good that you make me know your faults by putting them in writing while you have them still in movement within you. They are like those drops of water that are lost in the dryness of the earth where they fall for faults are lost as soon as they fall into a heart set on fire by love from God. Faults cannot exist along with this divine fire and not being great enough to extinguish the fire’s fervor, it happens necessarily that the same fervor consumes them.
Concerning the faults of my sister N., grace makes short work of her mishaps. We should not ask of her any more than that she follow the regular path of charity which has as many different laws that it itself makes as there are different persons whom it prevails on to love.
We are in a time when God measures hearts and tests them all the way to their bottom. Those who are unmoved and without apprehension are not the best people. It is only God who is the judge of the difference who demands of us only a complete submission in the midst of the dreads of our heart. But since it is only he who gives this submission, it is also only he who is able to discern it in us.
Translated from the French by Daniel McNeill
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