| Chapter 22. How One Should Live An Interior and Godly Life | ||||
The Servant.�Lord, many are the rules, many the ways of a godly life, the one is so, the other so. Many and various are the ways. Lord, the Scriptures are inexhaustible, their precepts innumerable. Teach me, O | ||||
Eternal Wisdom, in a few words, out of the abyss of all the things they contain, to what I ought chiefly to hold fast in the way of a truly pious life. | ||||
Eternal Wisdom.�The truest, most useful, and most practical doctrine for you in all the Scriptures that, in a few words, will more than amply convince you of all the truth requisite for the attainment of the summit of perfection in a godly life, is this doctrine: Keep yourself secluded from all mankind, keep yourself free from the influence of all external things, disenthrall yourself from all that depends on chance or accident, and direct your mind at all times on high in secret and divine contemplation, wherein, with a steady gaze from which you never swervest, you have Me before your eyes. And as to other exercises, such as poverty, fasting, watching, and every other castigation, bend them all to this as to their end, and use just so much and so many of them as may advance you to it. Behold, thus will you attain to the loftiest pitch of perfection, that not one person in a thousand comprehends, because, with their end in view, they all continue in other exercises, and so go astray the long years. | ||||
The Servant.�Lord, who can exist in the unswerving gaze of Your divine vision at all times? | ||||
Eternal Wisdom.�No one who lives here below in this temporal scene. | ||||
This has been said to you only that you mightest know at what you should aim, after what you should strive, to what you should turn your heart and mind. And if ever you losest sight of it, let it be to you as if your eternal salvation were taken away from you; and do you speedily turn to it again, so that you mayest again obtain possession of it; and then must you look carefully to yourself, for, if it escape from you, you are like a sailor from whose grasp the oars in a strong swell have slipped, and who does not know whither he shall direct his course. But if you mayest not as yet have a constant abiding place in divine contemplation, let the perpetually repeated collecting of your wandering thoughts, and the assiduous withdrawing of yourself to engage in it, procure you constancy so far as it is possible. Listen, listen, My child, to the faithful instructions of your faithful Father. O give heed to them! Shut them up in the bottom of your heart; think Who it is that teaches you all this, and how very much in earnest He is. Dost you wish to become ever more and more faithful? Then set My precepts before your eyes. Wherever you sit, standest, or walkest, think that I am present to you, and that I either admonish or converse with you. O, My child, keep within yourself keep yourself pure, disengaged, and retired. See, in this way will you become conscious of My words; that good, too, will be made known to you which, as yet, is greatly hidden from you. | ||||
The Servant.�O, Eternal Wisdom, praised be You for ever! Ah, my Lord and most faithful friend, if I would not do it otherwise, You would yet force me to do it with Your sweet words and Your gentle teaching. Lord, I ought and will do my very best towards it. | ||||