ve to the service
of God, and you will find it very little. Even the time you spent at
Mass and prayers was filled with distraction and little of it entirely
given to God. Since this is true for one year, what will it be for all
the years of your life? Think of them all and you will perceive that
God, who gave you all the time you had, and who on the last day will
demand an exact account of it, will find very little of it spent in His
honor or in His service. Even the time wasted in school and instructions
will all stand against you. Time lost is lost forever, and you can never
make it up. Next to grace, time is the most valuable thing God gives us,
and we should use it well. "Attributing to a creature a perfection" etc.
Persons who go to fortune tellers do this. Fortune tellers are persons
who pretend to know what is going to happen in the future. We know from
our religion that only God Himself knows the future. Neither the angels
nor saints, nor even the Blessed Virgin, know the future. Even they
could not tell your fortune unless God revealed it to them. So when you
go to a fortune teller you place the poor sinful person who is doing the
devil's work above the Blessed Virgin and all the saints and angels, and
make that wretch equal to God Himself. Surely this is a sin, even if you
do not believe these so-called fortune tellers, but go to them merely
through curiosity or with others. Again, we pay these persons for
telling us some foolish nonsense, and thus encourage them to continue
their sinful business. They doubtless laugh at the foolishness of those
who go to them or believe what they say and pay them generously. You
might with as much sense stop a man on the street, ask him to tell your
fortune, and hand him your money, for he would know as much about it as
so-called fortune tellers do. Rarely these sinful people might tell you
something that has happened in your life; but if they do, they merely
guess at it or are aided by the devil. The devil did not lose his
intelligence when driven out of Heaven, and he uses it now for doing
evil. He has vast experience, for he is as old as Adam, or older, and
has seen and known all the men that have lived in the world. He can move
rapidly through the world and easily know what is visibly taking place,
so that, strictly speaking, he could make known to his sinful agents
what is present or past, but never the future. Thus some fortune
tellers, clairvoyants, mindreaders, mediums