_In our projects_, which it multiplies, heaps up, reforms, and upsets. It
allows of no rest, until what it has undertaken is accomplished.
_In our actions._ Activity is absolutely necessary to us. We load
ourselves with a thousand things beyond our duty, sometimes even contrary
to it. Everything is done with impetuosity and haste, anxiety and
impatience to see the end.
_In our conversation._ Activity makes us speak without thinking,
interrupting rudely, reproving hastily, judging without appreciation. We
speak loudly, disputing, murmuring, and losing our temper.
_In prayer._ We burden ourselves with numberless prayers, repeated
carelessly, without attention, and with impatience to get to the end of
them; it interferes with our meditations, wearies, torments, fatigues the
brain, drying up the soul, and hindering the work of the HOLY SPIRIT.
2. _Curiosity_ lays the soul open to all external things, fills it with a
thousand fancies and questionings, pleasing or vexatious, absorbing the
mind, and making it quite impossible to retire within one's self and be
recollected. Then follow distaste, sloth, and ennui for all that savors of
silence, retirement, and meditation.
Curiosity shows itself, when _studies_ are undertaken from vanity, a
desire to know all things, and to pass as clever, rather than the real
wish to learn in order to be useful--in _reading_, when the spare time is
given up to history, papers, and novels--in _walking_, when our steps would
lead us where the crowd go to see, to know, only in order to have
something to retail; in fact, it manifests itself in a thousand little
actions; for instance, pressing forward with feverish haste to open a
letter addressed to us, longing eagerly to see anything that presents
itself, always being the first to tell any piece of news.... When we
forget GOD, He is driven from the heart, leaving it void, and then ensues
that wild craving to fill up the void with anything with which we may come
into contact.
3. _Cowardice._ GOD does not forbid patient, submissive pleading, but
murmuring fears are displeasing to Him, and He withdraws from the soul
that will not lean on Him. Cowardice manifests itself when in the _trials
of life_ we rebel against the Divine will that sends us illness, calumny,
privation, desertion; when in _dryness of soul_ we leave off our prayers
and communions because we feel no sensible sweetness in them; when we feel
a sickness of the soul that makes us uneasy, and fearful that GOD has
forsaken us.
The soul estranged from GOD seeks diversion in the world; but in the midst
of the world, GOD is not to be found; when temptations come, wearied,
frightened, and tormented, we wander farther and farther away from Him,
crying, "I am forsaken," when the trial has really been sent in order to
keep us on our guard, prevent our becoming proud, and offering us an
opportunity for showing our love.