Some one was praising country life, and calling it holy and innocent.
Blessed Francis replied that country life has drawbacks just as city life
has, and that as there is both good and bad company, so there is also good
and bad solitude. Good, when God calls us into it, as He says by a prophet,
_I will lead her into the wilderness and I will speak to her heart_.[1]
Bad, when it is of that kind of which it is written, _Woe to him that is
alone_.[2]
As regards holiness and innocence, he said that country folk were certainly
far from being, as a matter of course, endowed with these good qualities.
As for temptations and occasions of sin, he said: "There are evil spirits
who go to and fro in desert places quite as much as in cities; if grace
does not hold us up everywhere, everywhere we may stumble. Lot, who in the
most wicked of all cities was holy and just, when in solitude fell into
the most dreadful of sins. Men carry themselves about with them and find
themselves everywhere, and frailty can no more be got rid of by them than
can the shadow by the body that casts it.
"Many deceive themselves greatly and become their own seducers by imagining
that they possess those virtues, the sins contrary to which they do not
commit. The absence of a vice and the possession of its contrary virtue are
very different things.
"To be without folly is, indeed, to have the beginning of wisdom, but it is
a beginning so feeble as by itself scarcely to deserve the name of wisdom.
"Abstaining from evil is a very different thing from doing good, although
this abstaining is of itself a species of good: it is like the plan of a
building compared with the building itself. Virtue does not consist so much
in habit as in action. Habit is in itself an indolent sort of quality,
which, indeed, inclines us to do good, but does no more, unless inclination
be followed by action.
"How shall he who has no one in command set over him learn obedience? He
who is never contradicted, patience? He who has no superior, humility? And
how shall he who, like a misanthrope, flies from intercourse with other
men, notwithstanding that he is obliged to love them as himself, how shall
he, I say, learn brotherly love?
"There are many virtues which cannot be practised in solitude; above all,
mercy, upon the exercise of which we shall be questioned and judged at the
last day; and of which it is said: _Blessed are the merciful, for they
shall obtain mercy_."[3]
[Footnote 1: Osee ii. 14.]
[Footnote 2: Eccle. iv. 10.]
[Footnote 3: Matt. v. 7.]