Which of these two parts of sanctity is above our strength? Not the active part, since the duties it enjoins cease to be duties for us the moment our strength is really unequal to them. Will not the state of your health permit you to hear Mass? You are no longer obliged to do so. And so it is with all positive obligations which prescribe duties to be fulfilled. Only those precepts which forbid things evil in themselves admit of no exception, for it is never permitted to do evil.
Is there anything easier or more reasonable? What excuse can be urged against it? Yet this is all the co-operation God requires of the soul in the work of its sanctification.
He requires it of great and small, of strong and weak; in a word, of all, at all times, in all places.
Therefore He only requires of us what is easy, since to attain eminent sanctity requires but a simple good-will.
If over and above the commandments He shows us the counsels as the more perfect end of our efforts, He is ever careful to accommodate their observance to our position and character. As the chief mark of our vocation for the counsels He sends us the attractions and graces which facilitate the practice of them. He urges no one but in proportion to his strength and according to his attainments. Again I ask, what could be more just?
O you who aspire to perfection and are tempted to discouragement by what you read in the lives of the saints and find prescribed in certain pious books! O you who are overwhelmed by the terrible ideas that you form of perfection! It is for your consolation that God permits that I write this.
Learn what you seem not to know.
In the order of nature, necessary things, as air, water, earth, the God of all goodness has made common and easy of attainment. Nothing is more necessary than breath, sleep, food, and nothing is more common. Love and fidelity are no less necessary in the spiritual order; therefore the difficulty of acquiring them cannot be as great as you represent it to yourselves.
Observe your life; of what does it consist? Of a multitude of unimportant actions. Yet with these same unimportant actions God deigns to be content. This is the co-operation required of the soul in the work of its perfection. God Himself expresses it too clearly to admit of doubt: “Fear God, and keep His commandments: for this is all man” (Eccles. xii. 13). That is to say, this is all that is required on man’s part; in this consists his active fidelity. Let him fulfil his part; God will do the rest. Grace, working by itself, effects marvels which surpass the intelligence of man. For ear has not heard, eye has not seen, heart has not felt, what God conceives in His mind, resolves in His will, executes by His power in souls wholly abandoned to Him.
The passive part of sanctity is still easier, since it consists in accepting what very often we cannot avoid, and bearing with love, that is, with consolation and sweetness, what we too frequently endure with weariness and irritation. Again let me repeat, herein lies all sanctity. It is the grain of mustard-seed the fruits of which we do not gather, because we fail to recognize it in its littleness. It is the drachma of the Gospel, the treasure which we do not find, do not seek, because we imagine it too far beyond us.