They are also troubled with doubts, and are uncertain whether it is their duty or not to denounce the faults of their neighbour, to express their own disapproval, and to rebuke the offender. To a soul perplexed on this subject our Blessed Father gives the following wholesome advice: "As regards conversation, my dear daughter, do not worry about anything said or done by others. If good, you can praise God for it, if evil, it will furnish you with an opportunity of serving God by turning away your thoughts from it, showing neither surprise nor irritation, since you are not a person of sufficient importance to be able to put a stop to bad or idle talk. Indeed, any attempt on your part to do so would make things worse. Acting as as I bid you to do you will remain unharmed amid the hissing of serpents and, like the strawberry, will not assimilate their poison even though licked by their venomous tongues."
UPON EQUIVOCATING.
Our Saint used to say that to equivocate was, in his opinion, to canonize lying, and that simplicity was, after all, the best kind of shrewdness. The children of darkness, he said, use cunning and artifice in their dealings with one another, but the children of God should take for their motto the words: He that walketh sincerely walketh confidently.
Duplicity, simulation, insincerity always betray a low mind. If, in the language of the wise man, the lips that lie kill the soul, what can be the effect of the conversation of one who habitually speaks with a double heart?[1]
[Footnote 1: Psalm xii. 3.]
UPON SOLITUDE.
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.