Chapter II. Our happiness depends on our perfect submission to God, who ought to reign alone in our hearts

Our true greatness consists in our submission to God. We depend upon God in three ways. First, we cannot so much as exist but by Him. Secondly, we cannot have the means of arriving at Him, but from Him. Thirdly, we cannot take possession of our end and sovereign good but by Him. Herein the ancient philosophers deceived themselves, seeking their happiness in themselves and in human things.

God alone has right of sovereignty over hearts. Neither secular powers, nor the Church herself, extend their dominion thus far. What passes there depends not on them. There God alone is King. It is His own proper realm. There He establishes His throne of grace. This interior kingdom it is that constitutes His glory. Our perfection and our happiness consist in the subjection of our heart to this empire of God. The more our heart submits to Him, the more perfect and the more happy shall we be.

§ in. The supernatural government of one heart in which He reigns, is the object of more special care to God than is the natural government of the whole universe, and the civil government of all empires. God sets value on the heart alone ; if only He see that subjected to His power — if only He possess that. He is content. So, again, it is God alone that can satisfy our heart. The heart is a void, which can be filled only by God.

The delight of God is to converse with hearts ; there is the place of His rest ; and so likewise God alone is the centre of hearts, and they ought to find their rest only in God, and to have no movement but for God.

O blessed interior life, which causes God alone to live in hearts, and which causes hearts to live but for God alone, and to take no pleasure save in Him ! Blessed the life of that heart wherein God reigns, and which He possesses fully ! A life separated from the world, and hidden in God; a life of love and holy liberty; a life which causes the heart to find in the kingdom of God its joy, its peace, true pleasures, glory, solid greatness, goods and riches, which the world can neither give nor take away.

§v.

We imagine that a man must pass a sad and melancholy existence when he gives himself to recollection and the interior life. The very reverse is the case. Happiness even on this earth consists in possessing God ; and the more we renounce ourselves to unite ourselves to God, the more we cease to be miserable, and the more happy we become. But the devil takes advantage of our ignorance and our weakness, to plunge us into constant errors and infirmities, whence we must needs extricate ourselves, if we would be capable of the sovereign happiness of this life, which consists in seeing God, and in enjoying the gift of His holy Presence, without which the highest seraphim would be wretched. A soul which, contemplating God incessantly, should hold itself ever ready to execute His will, would be blessed.