ake trial of this love, and you will be wiser in
it than the most skillful philosophers. In love, as in everything else,
experience instructs better than reasoning. Come then, drink at this
fountain of living waters, instead of the broken cisterns of the
creature, which far from allaying your thirst, only tend continually to
augment it. Did ye once drink at this fountain, ye would not seek
elsewhere for anything to quench your thirst; for while ye still
continue to draw from this source, ye would thirst no longer after the
world. But if ye quit it, alas! the enemy has the ascendant. He will
give you of his poisoned draughts, which may have an apparent
sweetness, but will assuredly rob you of life.

I forsook the fountain of living water when I left off prayer. I
became as a vineyard exposed to pillage, hedges torn down with liberty
to all the passengers to ravage it. I began to seek in the creature
what I had found in God. He left me to myself, because I first left
him. It was His will by permitting me to sink into the horrible pit, to
make me feel the necessity I was in of approaching Him in prayer.

Thou hast said, that Thou wilt destroy those adulterous souls who
depart from Thee. Alas! it is their departure alone which causes their
destruction, since, in departing from Thee, O Sun of Righteousness,
they enter into the regions of darkness and the coldness of death, from
which they would never rise, if Thou didst not revisit them. If Thou
didst not by thy divine light, illuminate their darkness, and by thy
enlivening warmth, melt their icy hearts, and restore them to life,
they would never rise.

I fell then into the greatest of all misfortunes. I wandered yet
farther and farther from Thee, O my God, and thou didst gradually
retire from a heart which had quitted Thee. Yet such is thy goodness,
that it seemed as if Thou hadst left me with regret; and when this
heart was desirous to return again unto Thee, with what speed didst
Thou come to meet it. This proof of Thy love and mercy, shall be to me
an everlasting testimony of thy goodness and of my own ingratitude.

I became still more passionate than I had ever been, as age gave more
force to nature. I was frequently guilty of lying. I felt my heart
corrupt and vain. The spark of divine grace was almost extinguished in
me, and I fell into a state of indifference and indevotion, though I
still carefully kept up outside appearances. The habit I had acquired
of behavin