Some temptations bring men pleasure, some grief, some bodily pain. The Physician of souls by means of His judgments applies the remedy to each soul according to the cause of its passions.
Do not condemn today as base and wicked the man whom yesterday you praised as good and virtuous, changing love to hatred, because he has criticized you, but even though you are still full of resentment, commend him as before, and you will soon recover your same saving love.
Fear God and keep His commandments both in your feelings and in your intellect. If you force yourself to keep them in your intellect, bit by bit you will attain to fulfilling them in your feelings.
Someone may say: 'I have faith, and faith suffices for salvation.' St. James gives him the answer: 'Even the demons believe, and shudder. Faith without works is dead.' (James 2:17-19)
He who busies himself with the sins of others, or judges his brother on suspicion, has not yet even begun to repent or to examine himself so as to discover his own sins...
He who has been granted the grace of spiritual knowledge and yet harbors resentment, rancour or hatred for anybody, is like someone who lacerates his eyes with thorns and thistles. Hence knowledge must be accompanied by love.
Love and self-control free the soul from passions; spiritual reading and contemplation deliver the intellect from ignorance; and the state of prayer brings it into the presence of God Himself.
There is no venom more poisonous than that of the asp or cobra, and there is no evil greater than that of self-love. The winged children of self-love are self-praise, self-satisfaction, gluttony, unchastity, self-esteem, jealousy and the crown of all these, pride. Pride can drag down not men alone, but even angels from heaven, and surround them with darkness instead of light.
The one who prays ought never to halt his movement of sublime ascent toward God. For just as we should understand the ascent 'from strength to strength' as the progress in the practice of the virtues, 'from glory to glory' (2 Cor. 3:18) as the advance in the spiritual knowledge of contemplation, and the transfer from the letter of sacred writing to its spirit, so in the same way the one who is settled in the place of prayer should lift his mind from human matters and the attention of the soul to more divine realities.
Watchfulness and the Jesus Prayer, as I have said, mutually reinforce each other, for close attentiveness goes with constant prayer, while prayer goes with close watchfulness and attentiveness of intellect.
