In one of his letters written to a person both virtuous and honourable, in
whom he had great confidence, he says: "If you only knew how God deals with
my heart, you would thank Him for His goodness to me, and entreat Him to
give me the spirit of counsel and of fortitude, so that I may rightly act
upon the inspirations of wisdom and understanding which He communicates to
me." He often expressed the same thought to me in different words. "Ah!" he
would say, "how good must not the God of Israel be to such as are upright
of heart, since He is so gracious to those even who have a heart like mine,
miserable, heedless of His graces, and earth-bound! Oh! how sweet is His
spirit to the souls that love Him and seek Him with all their might! Truly,
His name is as balm, and it is no wonder that so many ardent spirits follow
Him with enthusiastic devotion, eagerly and joyously hastening to Him, led
by the sweetness of His attractions. Oh! what great things we are taught
by the unction of divine goodness! Being at the same time illumined by
so soft and calm a light that we can scarcely tell whether the sweetness
is more grateful than the light, or the light than the sweetness! Truly,
the breasts of the Spouse are better than wine, and sweeter than all the
perfumes of Arabia.[1]
"Sometimes I tremble for fear that God may be giving me my Paradise in this
world! I do not really know what adversity is; I have never looked poverty
in the face; the pains which I have experienced have been mere scratches,
just grazing the skin; the calumnies spoken against me are nothing but
a gust of wind, and the remembrance of them dies away with the sound of
the voice which utters them. It is not only that I am free from the ills
of life, I am, as it were, choked with good things, both temporal and
spiritual. Yet in the midst of all I remain ungrateful and insensible to
His goodness. Oh! for pity's sake, help me sometimes to thank God, and to
pray Him not to let me have all my reward at once!
"He, indeed, shows that He knows my weakness and my misery by treating me
thus like a child, and feeding me with sweetmeats and milk, rather than
with more solid food. But oh, when will He give me the grace, after having
basked in the sunshine of His favours, to sigh and groan a little under the
burden of His Cross, since to reign with Him, we must suffer with Him, and
to live with Him, we must die together with Him? Assuredly we must either
love or die, or rather we must die that we may love Him; that is to say,
die to all other love to live only for His love, and live only for Him who
died that we may live eternally in the embrace of His divine goodness."
[Footnote 1: Cantic. i. 1, 2.]