We experience daily the difficulty of leading the best men along the path of truth. It is not that I believe books are useless but we must speak about the truth as the Son of God speaks about his flesh, that it profits nothing and that it is the spirit that gives life. And then we must speak of his word and of his divine truth as well as what he said about his flesh because men amuse themselves now as much knowing a lot of truths as receiving a lot of Sacraments but the one and the other are of no profit if we are not predisposed towards grace and we do not make the renouncements necessary to prepare to receive it. Temporal and external goods are the least part of the problem. The main thing is to renounce internal things, our passions, our attachments, our greedy acquisitiveness, the remains of our sins and to take care to hold ourselves away from everything we do against God and to control ourselves all day long so that there be nothing empty, nothing that is not full of God. Then books, truths, Sacraments, preaching and everything else are a profit for a soul, even the sins that the soul falls into by weakness after all these precautions.
I remember nothing of what I said to you about the practice of holy things. I say things as I find them upon the moment in my spirit without remembering or caring if I said them. I do not take hold of anything except my present feelings which pass away. It is certain that our misery is great and that we are unable to keep ourselves a long time in the thought that God gives us sometimes about holy things. You must however consider yourself happy because of what you are now and recover yourself peacefully from your downfalls.
There is no greater pride than to wish to be as healthy as those who have not been at all dangerously sick. I count myself among such people. We should not divert ourselves referring to others but to ourselves and consider ourselves happy according to what we are now in reference to what we had been. We should thank God who withdrew us by such a special grace and by means of the truth from a condition where we would have remained insensibly although continually using the Sacraments.
All diversities must help us be unmoved and allow us to profit from everything, as much from the bad as the good moods of the world. God does not permit them except for our good. I would love to be able to make someone inherit my knowledge of this. All visible things are not worth looking at. That person is happy who makes himself invisible by becoming solitary. Death is always near us. That is the only thing we should keep visible with a spirit of love for God and for our neighbor.
We are happy knowing the truth but we are royally happy to make the truth live in us without any break.
The United States of the World, The End of All Beginnings, The Theater of the Impossible, books by Daniel McNeill, are for sale at:
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