Chapter XVI. Temptations

Temptations are the raw material of glory; and the ■Management of them is as great a work ay the government:>f an empire, and requires a vigilance as incessant and as universal. It is a startling thing to look out into the world and study its ways, and then to think that God was made Man and died upon the cross for its redemption. But it is equally startling to look at the lives of good men and examine their dispositions, and then to put one of the maxims of the Gospel alongside of them. At this very hour thousands of souls are earnestly complaining to God of their temptations, and hundreds of confessionals are filled with whispered and impatient murmurings against the vehemence or the perseverance of them. Yet, St. James says, My brethren, count it all joy when you nail fall into divers temptations. It is plain, therefore, that we either do not know or do not always bear in mind the true nature and character of temptations. They are nearly as multitudinous as our thoughts, and our only victory over them is through persisting courage, and an indomitable spirit of cheerfulness. The arrows of temptation fall harmless and blunted from a gay heart, which has first of all cast itself so low in its humility that nothing can cast it lower. Be joyous, or, to use scripture words. " rejoice, and again I say rejoice," and you will not heed your temptations, neither will they harm you. 24

But let us obtain a clear idea of the nature of temptations. It seems an obvious thing to say that in the first place they are not sins; yet it nine cases out of ten our unhappiness comes from not discerning this fact. Some defilement seems to come from the touch of a mere temptation j and at the same time it reveals to us, as nothing else does, our extreme feebleness and constant need of grace and of very great grace. We are like men who do not know how sore their bruises are until they are pressed, and then we exaggerate the evil. So when temptation presses our fallen and infirm nature, the tenderness is so sensible and so acute that it gives us at once the feeling of a wound or a disease. Yet we must be careful always to distinguish between a sin and a temptation.

Temptations are either in ourselves, or outside of us, or partly the one and partly the other. Those from within ourselves arise, either from our senses, which are free and undisciplined, or from our passions which are wild and uncorrected. Those which are outside assail us, either by delighting us, as riches, honours, attachments and distractions, or by attacking us as the demons-do; and those which partake of the nature of both possess the attractions of both. In one sense, however, all temptations consist in an alliance between what is within us, and what is without us. As I have said before, we must not put too much upon the devil; yet neither on the other hand must we be without fear of him, or without a true and scriptural estimate of his awful and malignant office. He goes about seeking whom he may devour. He is a roaring lion, when the roar will affright us, and a noiseless serpent when success is to be ensured by secrecy. He has

TEMPTATIONS. <I79 reduced the possibilities and probabilities of our destruction to a science which he applies with the most unrelenting vigour, the most masterly intelligence, almost unfailing power, and with the most ubiquitous variety. If it were not for the thought of grace, its abundance and its sovereignty, we should not dare to contemplate the ways and means of the Satanic kingdom.

Yet nowhere is it a mere fight between man and the devil. Wherever temptation is, there God is also. There is not one which His will has not permitted, and there is not a permission which is not an act of love as well. He has given His whole wisdom to each temptation. He has calculated its effects, and often diminishes its power. He has weighed and measured each by the infirmity of each tempted soul. He has deliberately contemplated the consequences of each, in union with its circumstances. The minutest feature has not escaped Him. The most hidden danger has been an element in His judgment. All this while the devil is passive and powerless. He cannot lay a finger on the child until its loving Father has prescribed the exact conditions, and has forewarned the soul by His inspirations, and forearmed it with proportionable succours of grace. Nothing is at random, as if temptations were hurrying here and there, like the bullets in the air of a battle-field. Moreover, each temptation has its own crown prepared for it, if we correspond to grace and are victorious. I do not know any picture of God more affecting, or more fatherly, than the vision of Him which faith gives us in His assiduous solicitudes and paternal occupations while we are being tempted. Where wert Thou, Lord! while I was being tempted? cried the saint of the desert. Close to you, my sou, all the while, was the tender reply.. As men feel sorrow to be at times a privilege, because it draws them into the sympathies of their superiors, so is it a joy to be tempted because it occupies God so intensely and so lovingly with our little interests and cares. The highest saint in heaven can never attain to love God, ai He loves a soul struggling with temptations.

Nevertheless, temptation is exquisite suffering, above that of sickness and adversity. There is something loathsome in the breath which it breathes upon us, something horribly fascinating in its eye, and paralyzing in its touch. We are faint and sick with the sense of our own corruption, and helpless weakness; and the thrilling interests involved in our resisting or succumbing agitate the most inward life of our soul. It is foolish either to deny the suffering or to make light of it. In either case we shall be less able to endure it. It must be in the nearness of God, and in the prompt superfluity of grace, that we must find our cheerfulness and our consolation.

With all his wisdom, the devil is constantly overreaching himself in temptations, not from stupidity, though perhaps God may stupify him from time to time, but from his ignorance of the invisible amount of grace which has been mercifully sent us. God's love is always so far above either our merits or even our expectations, that neither the tempter nor ourselves can ever come to believe it beforehand. Thus the devil sometimes tempts us too openly, and we are on our guard; or he sends us the wrong kind of temptation, as one man sometimes gets a letter intended for another; or he sends the right temptation at the wrong time; or, as he cannot always read our thoughts, he puts a wrong interpretation on our oat-ward actions; or he leaves off too soon; or he persists too long; or he under-estimates the effect of penance and our love of God on the old habits of past sin. So it is that from one cause or other he is continually over-reaching himself. This is a fact to be dwelt upon. For there are many who would, if questioned, answer quite correctly about Satan and the limitations of his power, who nevertheless practically in their own minds entertain a wrong idea of him, and their conduct under temptation shows the influence which this false view has upon them. Sometimes they are not nearly so much grieved at their falls as they ought to be, and sometimes they are panic-stricken as soon as they feel themselves in his grasp; so that for him to touch them is to conquer them. I am persuaded that a great deal of this is from their being possessed, half unconsciously, with a wrong idea of the devil, who acts upon them as the dread of ghosts acts upon children, unreasonably yet irresistibly. They look upon him as God's rival, a sort of wicked god, with godlike attributes all evil, and an omnipotence of iniquity They do not remember that he is simply our fellow-creature, and a conquered and blighted creature. We have reason to fear him. Yet we are not panic-stricken with the hourly companionship of our own corrupt nature. And we have far more to fear from it than from him. Great however as are the pain and annoyance which the soul experiences from temptation, it is very often a gift of God not to be delivered from them. Sometimes it is even wise not to pray for deliverance, but only for valour to fight a good fight. St. Paul three times asked to hve his thorn removed, in imitation doubtless of oui Lord's triple prayer to have His chalice pass from Him j 24 and ihe answer which God vouchsafed was a proof how greit a gift the temptation, or its permission, really was. It has been remarked by an eminent writer on the interior life, and it may be a great consolation to many to know it, that when the devil attacks our body it is often a sign that he has been secretly attacking our soul, and has been foiled. It is also a characteristic of his efforts rather to turn us from virtue than to impel us to vice. This is particularly the case with spiritual people. With them sins of omission make more for him than sins of commission, not only because it is less easy to lead a spiritual man into the former than into the latter, but also because the latter more effectually rouse him to repentance. Lukewarmness is often nothing more than a clogging up of the avenues of the soul with sins of omission, so that the cool and salutary inundations of grace are hindered.

Nevertheless the approaches of the devil need hardly ever take the vigilant by surprise. Whether it be of the spiritual nature of our soul, or of the fore'warnings of grace, we have almost always a presentiment of his coming, provided we have a habit of self-recollection. The great thing when we feel that presentiment is not to be perturbed, but to meet him in the calmness of humility. This calmness must never desert us during the whole of the fight, least of all when we feel the delectation which in many cases the temptation will infallibly excite. I say in many cases, because there are whole classes of temptations which would not be temptations, at all were it not for the delectation. But the delectation is not consent. We are not the masters of the first indeliberate movements of our own hearts and minds. The enemy may run his hand flourishingly over the keys before we are aware. But there must be a deliberate acceptation and retention of the delectation before it can amount to consent or become a sin.

All men have their temptations, and all men's temptations are multitudinous. But among the various pathg by which God onducts chosen souls, one is the way of temptations. These souls then are not in the case of other men. Temptation is their road, and their only road. They pass through crowds of them, and from one crowd into another, each surpassing its predecessor in horror and ugliness. But this is not God's ordinary way, and we are not concerned with legislating for it here. Yet the fact that God can make a way of perfection consist of temptations only, throws considerable light on the nature of temptation generally.

But from the nature let us pass to the times of temptation. It is to be observed that we may often have seasons of great grace, without being at all aware of it, from the extreme hiddenness of the operations of the Holy Ghost in our souls. But temptation is a much more obvious thing than grace; and it is generally the case that a season of peculiar temptation is also a season of peculiar grace. And this it is a consolation to know. Thus, when St. Stephen's heroic faith was passing through its extremest temptations, he beheld our Lord, not sitting, but standing, at the right hand of the Father, expressive of the aid He was rendering to His servant in his hour of need. Temptations also vary with the times of the spiritual life to which they belong. The temptations of beginners are not those of proficients, nor those of proficients the temptations of the perfect If all are terrible, all are in God's hands, and so we may be tranquil and of good cheer. There are also times of temptation, when our own past sin, or our present culpable inadvertence, is the cause of them. We have brought them upon ourselves; and this makes them all the harder for our self-love to bear. Still, even though they are the just and immediate chastisement of our own faults, the patient endurance of them is not the less meritorious \ and disquietude forms no part of accepted penance. Times of prayer are also times of peculiar temptation. This was naturally to be expected, inasmuch as there is nothing the devil so much desires to interrupt as our communication with God. Indeed, the access and vehemence of temptations form a part of the supernatural difficulties of prayer. The spiritual life itself, with its times of retreat or of increased recollection, brings us into seasons of peculiar temptation. The world with its outward attractions is removed from us, and the devil, in dread of these epochs of recollection, more than supplies their place with his inward appliances of temptation. There are times also when he teases us with temptations to which he knows beforehand that we shall not yield; yet in which he finds his account because they disquiet us, or dishearten us, or throw us intr a general irritability. There are other times in which he tempts us in the grace we have just used to overcome him, and in the strength of which we actually have overcome him. The reason of this is that our success has thrown us off our guard, and we never dream of failing in a virtue which but a moment before has flushed us with the joy of victory. Thus, our Lord having put His confidence in His Father, the devil first tempted Him by it.

From the times of temptation we pass to its kinds.

Some temptations are frequent: and there is a peculiai danger in their frequency. They dissipate us, and break up the calm of our recollection. Or they tire us, and a! last we sit down and give up the battle out of weariness Or we get used to them, and lose our wholesome fear of them. These frequent temptations have generally some connection with our ruling passion. Some temptations are durable, and they also have dangers of their own, and consolations of their own. Their chief danger is their outliving our powers of perseverance; and their chief consolation is that their very durability is a sign they have not triumphed. The pressure is removed the moment we 3onsent; and consequently the lasting of the burden is a measure of the grace God has given us to resist it. Although Jesus seems fast asleep in the boat, yet that it is not submerged in the dark angry waters is because He is there. There are other temptations which are brief, brief and gentle, or brief and violent. The brief and gentle leave us in doubt whether we have not consented, and so perplex us: the brief and violent stun us for the moment, and leave us in an amazement during which other temptations may come and surprise us. Each virtue has its own attendant temptations, set like spies round about it by the devil. The great object of these is to make us retire from holy enterprise, and reduce ua to an unmeritorious inaction. We must meet these as St. Bernard met the devil when he tempted him to vainglory in the middle of a sermon, " I did not begin for you, and so I shall not leave off for you." Temptations which approach us by the senses are proof against all weapons except those of mortification and the sacraments. Temptations against faith and chastity are two classes apart, and have this peculiarity, that they are never to be directly resisted, but fled from. We must distract ourselves from them instead of striking them. There are other temptations, which are merely feelers to explore our possibilities of sin. The devil sends these out to gain knowledge of us, as he cannot read our hearts;¹ just as a besieging army sends rockets here and there into a city to try for the powder magazines. But among all these kinds of temptations, there is no one class, which is any sign that our souls are in an evil state. Spiritual writers jay this down as an undoubted fact; and yet how much self-torment there is in the world because silly peevish souls will persist in acting as if its contrary were true.

But what are the uses of tempations? So many and so great that I can do no more than indicate a few of them here. They try us, and we are worth nothing if we are not tried. Our trial is the one thing God cares for, and it is the only thing which gives us the least knowledge of ourselves. They disgust us with the world almost as effectually as the sweetnesses which God gives us in prayer. And how hard it is to become thoroughly disgusted with the world: and how very much more we really love the world than we have any idea of! Oh, of what price ought anything to be which helps us to a true and final divorce from this seductive world! They enable us to merit more, that is, they increase God's love of us, and our love of God, and our glory with God hereafter. They punish us for past sins; and we ought to court such

TEMPTATIONS. 28V punishments eagerly, for five minutes of free-will suffering on earth are worth five years of the tardy cruelties of purgatory. They purify us for God's presence, which is the very office of purgatory itself, and anticipate its work and so prevent its fires. They prepare us for spiritual consolations, perhaps they even earn them for us. St. Philip says that God gives us first a dark and then a bright day all through life. Can words tell the joy it is to be consoled by God? Are not souls whom He has touched obliged to hold their tongues, because they have no words to express the happiness it was? And probably without the temptation, the consolation never would have come. Or if it had come, it might have harmed us. The temptation has made us capable of bearing it without loss, and tasting it and not fainting away with its unearthly sweetness. Temptations teach us our own weakness, and so humble us; and could our guardian angels do more than this for us, in all the variety of their affectionate ministrations? Dear Prince, more than brother! I say it not in light esteem of his unutterable kindness, who never leaves me a solitary speck in this huge creation of God, and whose services I shall never know till they all meet me at the doom brighter than a thousand suns, and whose love will come to a head rather than to an end when he embraces me in the first moment of the resurrection of the flesh! But he wishes nothing so much as to keep me humble, and temptations help him to do the work. They give us also a greater esteem of grace, and the want of this is daily the cause of more evil in the world than the devil can cause in a whole century. Grace grows by being 3steemed. It multiplies itself when it is honoured, just as faith merits miracles, while infidelity hinders even our Lord from working them. They make virtue take deeper root, and so they play their part in the grand grace of final perseverance. How shallow would all spirituality be if it were not for temptations. How shallow good men actually are, who are not much tempted! The Church can never trust them in her hour of need. They are always on the side on which St. Thomas of Canterbury would not have been. Temptations again make us more watchful, and so instead of leading into sin, they hinder shoals of sins. They make us more fervent, and kindle in us such a fire of love as burns away the hay and straw of venial sin, and cauterizes the half-healed wounds which mortal sin has made. A transport of generous love can do a work as great, and the great work as well, as a year's fast on bread and water, with a discipline a day. Lastly, they teach us spiritual science: for what we know of self, of the world, of the demons, an<J of the artifices of divine grace, is chiefly from the phenomena of temptation, and from our defeats quite as mucl as from our victories.

These are the uses of temptations, and they leave seven permanent blessings behind them. They leave us merit, which is no transient thing. Nay, such is its vitality that when mortal sin has put it to death, penance can bring it to life again. They leave us love, both God's love of us and our love of Him. They leave us humility; and with that all other gifts of God j for the Holy Spirit Himself rests upon the humble, and makes His dwelling in theii hearts. They leave us solidity. Our building is so much higher than it was, and its foundations more safely and more permanently settled. They leave us self-knowledge, without which all we do is done in the dark, and the rul never shines upon the soul, and the ground is never clear for the operations of grace. They leave us self-love killed j and has life a fairer task than the burial of its worst and most odious enemy? Its dead body is more to us than the relic of an apostle, and surely that is saying much. They leave us thrown upon God. For no nurse ever put a babe into its father's arms more carefully or more securely than temptations put us into the extended arms of God. And yet we complain — complain of our temptations! Perverse race! it has always been so; from beneath the apple-tree in Eden to this hour, we do not know our own happiness, and in our ignorance we pick a special quarrel with it!

Mistakes can be made about temptations as about every thing else in the spiritual life; and many have been already implied and explained in what has been said. There are, however, four particular mistakes on which a few words may be of use. The first mistake is that we are apt to think the time spent in combating temptations is time lost. We are all very well and very tranquil, and more or less consciously in the presence of God, at our ordinary occupations; but the time comes for visiting the Blessed Sacrament, and all at once we are assailed with a multiplicity of temptations. We have but a quarter of an hour to be there, and the whole time has gone in doing battle with these miserable temptations; or we rise in the morning, full of the thought of God, and say prayers while we are dressing. We then kneel down to begin our meditation, and a host of temptations forthwith assail us. The hour-glass runs down, and what have we done? Nothing but fight, and it seems, too, unsatisfactorily, with these pestering temptations. Now we must remember 25 T fchat we aie not to serve God for consolations, or after our own fashion, and according to our own taste; but according to His wisdom and His will. His rewards are not attached to the good works we prescribe to ourselves, but to the combats in which it is His good pleasure to involve us. Time can never be lost which is spent in doicg the will of God. On the contrary, all time is lost which is spent otherwise. What is our object? It is either to be glorifying God, or to be perfect, or to reach heaven. Fighting a temptation is the shortest road to all these three ends.

The second mistake is the misapprehension of temptations by negligent souls. Sometimes they think it a mark of spiritual advancement to be inactive and almost passive under temptations. They apply to themselves advices which belong only to the perfect, or maxims which were intended for the scrupulous. Thus they fall into a pernicious habit of letting dangerous thoughts pass through their minds, without demanding or examining their passports; and this not only weakens their mind, but seems to saturate it with undesirable images and inclinations. Their feeling about sin ceases to be what it was, and their confidence in themselves increases as the probabilities of a fall increase also. The consequence of all this is a state of torpor and of general slovenliness with God, from which if they are roused at all, it is probably by the commission of mortal sin. Lukewarm souls have sometimes been renewed to holiness in this dreadful way, and God has shown them mercy even in the judicial chastisement of this adorable permission. But it is a process, the very thought of which should make us shudder, and which probably never happened to any one who was negligent because he trusted to repentance wilfully delay id, and to the uucertain possibilities of an eventual reconciliation with God. Whoever has familiarized himself with what he knows are temptations, and has domesticated the thought of them in his mind, no matter of what class they may be, has taken a decided step towards that state of tepidity whose logical development is final impenitence. The third mistake concerns our use of the calms which come between the storms of periodical temptations. Every one knows by his own experience that he is subject to particular classes, or to one particular class of temptations, which come round in perfect hurricanes, like circular storms with fair and tranquil weather between. We have been going on in our ordinary way. We see no reason for a change, either in ourselves or in external circumstances, when all at once the storm is down upon us, with the same sort of panic the heathen felt when it thundered out of a clear sky. We are possessed with the images of the temptation. Every outward object turns into them. We hear voices, as we think, and inarticulate sounds shape themselves into intelligible words. The lines of books run into the ideas of temptation, and prayers and holy names seem only fresh food for the beleaguered imagination. We are sunk, overhead, deep down, in temptations, and the masterful current is sweeping in eddies above us. It is not as with Peter that a Hand was held out as we were in the act of sinking. We are sunk. Yes! and Jesus is with us in the deep where we are. Now in the storm we have simply nothing to do but to hold fast to God with all our might and main. There is no help for it. We cannot legislate for a hurrieane. The real work of the storm must be done in the preceding caln.. It is a mistake to look upon these calm as a time of rest when we may give ourselves up to the simple enjoyment of the absence of the temptations, or of the spiritual sweetness with which these tempests are commonly followed. We must lay our plans then, and make our resolutions, with a foresight of what we have to encounter. We must fix on occasions to avoid, increase our mortifications, and redouble our prayers. If we have gone down in many a storm, it has been because we made holydays of our calms. Remember, in the spiritual life there are recreations; but there are no holydays. That school breaks up but once, and the home afterwards is eternal.

A fourth mistake is the delusion with which the devil tries to possess us, that if we give way in some of the circumstances of the temptation, or to the temptation itself short of sin, we shall weaken it. Our whole mind seems so completely overlaid with the images of temptation, that we think we shall suffer some permanent moral injury, if it lasts, and. that anything short of sin is not allowable only, but desirable also, which will release us from it. It is strange that so gross a snare should ever succeed; yet it does so in many cases. We must remember, therefore, that to yield is to weaken ourselves, not the temptation. We shall get no foothold so strong as our first; and men often discover to their cost that even a change of position, without abandoning an attitude of defence, is as good as a defeat in the time of temptation.

But how are we to overcome temptations? Cheerfulness is the first thing, cheerfulness the second, and cheer* fulness the third. The devil is chained. He can bark, but he cannot bite, unless we go up to him and let him

Bo so. We must be of good courage. The power of temptation is in the fainting of our own hearts. Confidence in God is another spiritual weapon, the more potent Decause no one can have confidence in God who has not the completest diffidence of himself. God's cause is ours, for temptation is more really the devil's wrath against God who has punished him, than against us, whom he only envies. Our ruin is important to him only as it is a blow at God's glory. Thus God is bound to us, as it were; as it is for His sake that we are thus persecuted. We may be sure, indeed we know infallibly, that we shall never be tried beyond our strength. Prayer, especially ejaculatory prayer, is another obvious means of victory, together with mortification and the frequenting of the sacraments, which are all of them wells of supernatural fortitude.

Examination of conscience must help us to detect the weak and vulnerable parts of our nature; and then we must exercise ourselves in acts contrary not only to oui peculiar infirmities, but also to our besetting temptations. We must avoid idleness, and crush beginnings. We must not speak of our temptations indiscriminately to persons who have no right to know anything about them, nor even to our spiritual friends. It gives no real relief, and it feeds the ideas. Neither must we be cast down if our director treats our temptations more lightly than we think they deserve. What is the good of speaking to him at all about them, if we are not going to obey his rules and adopt his view and follow his advice?

In times of temptation we must be very eareful not to retrench any of our spiritual exercises, a line of conduct or which the evil one may suggest very specious reasons 25*

We ha\e need of all our strength at that moment; air k we never know to which of our ordinary exercises God attaches His grace. It would have been better for the apostles to have struggled through a drowsy, dry, distracted prayer, than to have simply gone to sleep in the garden of Gethsemane. We must remember also that all our spiritual exercises are less prompt and pleasant when we are under temptations; because we are teased and puzzled by them. Hence nature is more likely to suggest the abridgment or discontinuance of some of them, on the ground of their being useless and spiritless. But although things are established by the mouth of two witnesses, those two must not be the devil and the human spirit. We must also be cautious not to change our purposes at such times. The dust and smoke of the battle hang over us, and darken all things. It is not a time for us to see God's will about changes and vocations. His will just then is that we resist the evil, and therefore that is the single thing for us to do. Nay, we must beware even of any new good which makes its appearance, knocks at the door of our heart, or puts itself ready-made into our hands, at such a season. St. Ignatius long since warned us of a family of temptations which present themselves in the disguise of good. God would not send us the good then, or in that way. His will, once more, is that we should resist the evil. The good will keep, if it be real good; and He will send us peaceable times when we can calmly and deliberately take it upon ourselves.

We must also be upon our guard against very little temptations, or such as we should call little. For things must have comparative magnitudes, even where our soul** uri concerned. It is no uncommon thing for a man who has resisted great temptations to fall in little ones. This is very intelligible. Wherever there is dignity in an action or a suffering we can the better brace ourselves up to it; for we can draw largely upon nature as well as grace. Self-love likes dignity, and will go through endless pain, as if it were an insensible thing, in order to obtain it. Hence comes the importance of little things in religion. Nature has less to do with them, and so they rivet our union with God more closely. The conversion of souls, works of mercy on a grand scale, visiting prisons, preaching, hearing confessions, and even establishing religious institutes, are comparatively easy works when put by the side of exactitude in daily duties, observation of petty rules, minute custody of the senses, kind words and modest exterior which preach the presence of God. We gain more supernatural glory in little things, because more fortitude is required, as they are continuous, uninterrupted, and with no dignity about them to spur us on. All the strength we require must be found within. We have no outward place or praise of men, to rest our lever on, and furthermore heroism in little things is more a matter of endurance than of action. Lt is a perpetual constraint.

Moreover, our spirit is more effectually taken captive in little things. Its defeats are more frequent. The very continuity of the actions forms a linked chain, which extends to many things. No attachment is to be merely natural, no word unweighed, no step precipitate, no pleasure enjoyed sensually, no joy to evaporate in dissipation, the heart never to rest on carnal tenderness alone, no action to have its spring in self-will. We tremble at such seeming impossibilities of perfection; — yet it is only the perfection of little things! Then, again, theie is something so humbling and secret in little things. Who knows if we count our words, or what feelings we are curbing? God will let us fall in these very respects to hide us more in Himself, and from the eyes of men. We carry the mortification of Jesus about us unseen. It is a slow martyrdom of love. God is the only spectator of our agony. Nay, we ourselves find it hard to realize that we are doing purely for God such a multitude of trivial things; hence we have no room for vain-glory, no fallacious support of conscious human rectitude.

But in these little things we not only gain more glory for ourselves, but we give more glory to God. We show more esteem for Him in them ', for there must necessarily be more pure motive and sheer faith in little than in great things. Great things by their greatness often hide God; and at the best the esteem in great things is mostly divided Detween God and the glory of the action, and so the whole work is tainted Whereas the littleness and vileness of small things, their apparent facility and men's contempt for them, leave the soul face to face with God in the dis enchanting twilight of interior mortification. But it is not merely esteem. More actual tribute is paid to God in little things. In great things we have more help given us, and we give God less because we have to labour less. The abundance of grace, the sweetness of it, and the animation of spirit from the pursuit of a great object, are three things which lessen our own labour. Yet it is our own toil that is the real tribute to God, just as dry prayers are said to be more meritorious than sweet ones. In great things too we seldom have the liberty of acting as we please.

Tn little ones we have, and we pay that liberty away hour by hour to God as a tribute of fidelity and love.

But esteem and tribute are not all. We sacrifice more to God in little things. We think little of little things, and so we make the sacrifice, not in swelling thoughts of mightiness, but out of a subdued feeling of our own utter nothingness, and of the immensity of our being allowed to make any sacrifice to God at all. We sacrifice also our self-interest, which is not attracted by anything in these ignoble victims; and so we seek God only, and put aside the pursuit of praise and self. We forego also the enjoyment of strenuous manly action; for what manliness, as men count things, is there in regularity, littleness, exactness, and obscurity? Yet this is the only road to solid virtue. It was not what we read of in the saints that made them saints: it was what we do not read of them that enabled them to be what we wonder at while we read. Words cannot tell the abhorrence nature has of the piecemeal captivity of little constraints. And as to little temptations, I can readily conceive a man having the grace to be roasted over a slow fire for our dearest Mother's Immaculate Conception or the Pope's Supremacy, who would not have the grace to keep his temper in a theological conversation on either of those points of the catholic faith.

One more question remains about temptations. How shall we behave when we ourselves are overcome? There is but one answer, one advice: it is childish: but is there any other? When we fall we must rise again, and go on our way, wishing ourselves, after a Christian fashion, better luck another time.

Footnotes

1. Surin says he can j but the consent of theologians is against him j and his phenomena are explicable without denying the admitted maxims of the schools. ↩