_He who is not tempted what knows he?_ says Holy Scripture. God is
faithful, and will not permit us to be tempted beyond our strength; nay, if
we are faithful to Him, He enables us to profit by our tribulation. He not
only helps us, but He makes us find our help in the tribulation itself, in
which, thinking we were perishing, we cried out to Him to save us.
Those who imagine themselves to be in danger of losing the Faith, when the
temptations suggested to them by the enemy against this virtue, harass and
distress them, understand very little of the nature of temptations. For,
besides that temptation cannot harm us, as long as it is displeasing to us,
which is the teaching of one of the early Fathers, it actually, in such
case, produces an absolutely contrary effect to what we fear, and to the
aim of our adversary, the devil. For just as the palm tree takes deeper and
stronger root, the more it is tossed and shaken by the winds and storms,
so the more we are tossed by temptation, the more firmly are we settled in
that virtue which the temptation was striving to overthrow.
As we see from the lives of the Saints, the most chaste are those who
oppose the greatest resistance to the goad of sensuality, and the most
patient are those who struggle the most earnestly against impatience. It
is for this reason that Holy Scripture says: _Happy is he who suffers
temptation_, since, _after his trial, the crown of life awaits him_.[1]
In this way the more violent are the temptations against Faith with which
a soul is troubled, the more deeply does that virtue bury itself in the
heart, and is there held all the more tightly and closely, because of our
fear lest it escape.
Blessed Francis provides us in one of his letters with three excellent
means of resisting and overcoming temptations against Faith. The first, is
to despise all the suggestions of the Evil One. They are outside and before
our heart rather than within it, for there peace maintains its hold, though
in great bitterness. This so exasperates our proud enemy, who is king over
all the children of pride, that, seeing himself disdained, he withdraws.
The second is not to fight against this temptation by contrary acts of
the understanding, but by those of the will, darting forth a thousand
protestations of fidelity to the truths which God reveals to us by His
Church. These acts of Faith, supernatural as they are, soon reduce to ashes
all the engines and machinations of the enemy.
Our Saint gives us his third means, the use of the discipline, saying that
this bodily suffering serves as a diversion to trouble of mind, and adds
that the devil, seeing the flesh, which is his partisan and confederate,
thus maltreated, is terrified and flies away. This is to act like that
King of Moab, who brought about the raising of the siege of his city, by
sacrificing his son on the walls, in the sight of his enemies, so that,
panic-stricken, with horror at a sight so appalling, they took at once to
flight.
[Footnote 1: James i. 12.]