he rule of St. Austin.

* * * * *

One sermon perfectly converted one who had been long enslaved to the
world and his passions, and made him a saint. How comes it that so many
sermons and pious books produce so little fruit in our souls? It is
altogether owing to our sloth and wilful hardness of heart, that we
receive God's {547} omnipotent word in vain, and to our most grievous
condemnation. The heavenly seed can take no root in hearts which receive
it with indifference and insensibility, or it is trodden upon and
destroyed by the dissipation and tumult of our disorderly affections, or
it is choked by the briers and thorns of earthly concerns. To profit by
it, we must listen to it with awe and respect, in the silence of all
creatures, in interior solitude and peace, and must carefully nourish it
in our hearts. The holy law of God is comprised in the precept of divine
love; a precept so sweet, a virtue so glorious and so happy, as to carry
along with it its present incomparable reward. St. John, from the moment
of his conversion, by the penitential austerities which he performed,
was his own greatest persecutor; but it was chiefly by heroic works of
charity that he endeavored to offer to God the most acceptable sacrifice
of compunction, gratitude, and love. What encouragement has Christ given
us in every practice of this virtue, by declaring, that whatever we do
to others he esteems as done to himself! To animate ourselves to fervor,
we may often call to mind what St. John frequently repeated to his
disciples, "Labor without intermission to do all the good works in your
power, while time is allowed you." His spirit of penance, love, and
fervor he inflamed by meditating assiduously on the sufferings of
Christ, of which he often used to say: "Lord, thy thorns are my roses,
and thy sufferings my paradise."

Footnotes:
1. The venerable John of Avila, or Avilla, who may be called the father
of the most eminent saints that flourished in Spain in the sixteenth
century, was a native of the diocese of Toledo. At fourteen years of
age he was sent to Salamanca, and trained up to the law. From his
infancy he applied himself with great earnestness to prayer, and all
the exercises of piety and religion; and he was yet very young when
he found his inclinations strongly bent towards an ecclesiastical
state in order to endeavor by his tears and labors to kindle the
fire