It shows itself:—
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, [pg 130] 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 [pg 131] 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.