in man, but I go in for fair play for the soul. The better part
should have the greater share. The right order of things has been
reversed: _con_-version is necessary. Read the lives of the old
Fathers of the Desert. They determined on leading a rational and
divine life. How little are they known or appreciated in our day!
Their lives are more interesting than a novel and stranger than a
romance."

"Self-love, self-activity, self-hood, is something not easily
destroyed. It is like a cancer which has its roots extending to the
most delicate fibres of our mental and moral nature. Divine grace can
draw them all out. But how slowly! And how exquisitely painful is the
process--the more subtle the self-love the more painful the cure."

"Never practise any mortification of a considerable character without
counsel. The devil, when he can no longer keep us back, aims at
driving us too far and too fast."

"How can the intellect be brought under direction of divine grace
except by reducing it to its nothingness?--and how can this be done
except by placing it in utter darkness? How can the heart be filled
with the spirit of divine love while it contains any other? How can
it be purified of all other inordinate love except by dryness and
bitterness? God wishes to fill our intelligence and our hearts with
divine light and love, and thus to deify our whole nature--to make us
one with what we represent--God. And how can He do this otherwise
than by removing from our soul and its faculties all that is contrary
to the divine order?"

"All your difficulties are favors from God; you see them on the wrong
side, and speak as the block of marble would while being chiselled by
the sculptor. When God purifies the soul, it cries out just like
little children do when their faces are washed. The soul's attention
must be withdrawn from external, created things and turned inward
towards God exclusively before its union with Him; and this
transformation is a great, painful, and wonderful work, and so much
the more difficult and painful as the soul's attention has been
attracted and attached to transitory things--to creatures."

He was often heard repeating the following verse from _The Imitation_
(book iii. chap. xxxi.), as summarizing the necessary conditions of
the active life: "Unless a man be elevated in spirit, and set at
liberty from all creatures, and wholly united to God, whatever he
knows and whatever he has is of no great weight." He