495

If it is an extraordinary blindness to live without investigating what
we are, it is a terrible one to live an evil life, while believing in
God.

496

Experience makes us see an enormous difference between piety and
goodness.

497

_Against those who, trusting to the mercy of God, live heedlessly,
without doing good works._--As the two sources of our sins are pride and
sloth, God has revealed to us two of His attributes to cure them, mercy
and justice. The property of justice is to humble pride, however holy
may be our works, _et non intres in judicium_,[183] etc.; and the
property of mercy is to combat sloth by exhorting to good works,
according to that passage: "The goodness of God leadeth to
repentance,"[184] and that other of the Ninevites: "Let us do penance to
see if peradventure He will pity us."[185] And thus mercy is so far from
authorising slackness, that it is on the contrary the quality which
formally attacks it; so that instead of saying, "If there were no mercy
in God we should have to make every kind of effort after virtue," we
must say, on the contrary, that it is because there is mercy in God,
that we must make every kind of effort.

498

It is true there is difficulty in entering into godliness. But this
difficulty does not arise from the religion which begins in us, but from
the irreligion which is still there. If our senses were not opposed to
penitence, and if our corruption were not opposed to the purity of God,
there would be nothing in this painful to us. We suffer only in
proportion as the vice which is natural to us resists supernatural
grace. Our heart feels torn asunder between these opposed efforts. But
it would be very unfair to impute this violence to God, who is drawing
us on, instead of to the world, which is holding us back. It is as a
child, which a mother tears from the arms of robbers, in the pain it
suffers, should love the loving and legitimate violence of her who
procures its liberty, and detest only the impetuous and tyrannical
violence of those who detain it unjustly. The most cruel war which God
can make with men in this life is to leave them without that war which
He came to bring. "I came to send war,"[186] He says, "and to teach them
of this war. I came to bring fire and the sword."[187] Before Him the
world lived in this false peace.

499

_External works._--There is nothing so perilous as what pleases God and
man. For those states, which ple