Letter III. To a Young Lady

The Saint invites her to despise the world. She is not to show too much wit.

I answer your last letter, my good daughter. The ardours of love in prayer are good if they leave good effects and occupy you not with yourself, but with God and his holy will. In a word, all interior and exterior movements which strengthen your fidelity towards this Divine will are always good. Love, then, celestial desires, and desire as strongly celestial love. We must desire to love and love to desire what can never be enough desired or loved.

May God give us the grace, my daughter, to absolutely despise the world, which is so hostile to us as to crucify us if we crucify it. But mental abnegations of worldly vanities and goods are made easily enough: real ones are far more hard. And here you are amidst the occasions of practising this virtue up to its extreme point, since to this abnegation is joined reproach, and since it comes on you, without you and through you, or rather in God, with God and for God.

You do not satisfy me about what I said to you the other day, on your first letter, touching those worldly repartees, and that vivacity of heart which urges you. My child, determine to mortify yourself in this: often make the cross on your mouth, that it may open only according to God.

Truly a lively wit often causes us much vanity; and we oftener show disdain by the expression of our mind than the expression of our face; we give arch looks by our words, as well as by the looks themselves. It is not good to walk on tiptoe, either in mind or body; for if we stumble the fall is all the worse. So then, my child, take good pains to cut off, little by little, this excrescence of your spiritual tree; keep your heart very low, very quiet there at the foot of the cross. Continue to tell me very frankly and often news of that heart, which mine cherishes with great love, on account of him, who died of love, that we might live by love in his holy death.

Vive Jesus.