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 please God and man, have one property which pleases God, and another which pleases men; as the greatness of Saint Teresa.  What pleased God was her deep humility in the midst of her revelations; what pleased men was her light.  And so we torment ourselves to imitate her discourses, thinking to imitate her conditions, and not so much to love what God loves, and to put ourselves in the state which God loves.

It is better not to fast, and thereby humbled, than to fast and be self-satisfied therewith.  The Pharisee and the Publican.[188]

What use will memory be to me, if it can alike hurt and help me, and all depends upon the blessing of God, who gives only to things done for Him, according to His rules and in His ways, the manner being as important as the thing, and perhaps more; since God can bring forth good out of evil, and without God we bring forth evil out of good?