The marvels of this work which gratify the curiosity of our readings serve only to disgust us with the apparently unimportant events through which, if we despise them not, the divine love effects great things in us. Foolish creatures that we are! We admire, we bless, this divine action in its written history; but when it would continue to write its gospel in our hearts, we hold the paper in continual unrest, and we impede its action by our curiosity to know what it effects in us and what it effects elsewhere.
Pardon, divine Love, for I am writing my own defects, and I have not yet learned what it is to abandon myself to Thy hand. I have not yet yielded myself to the mould. I have walked through Thy divine studios, I have admired all Thy works, but I have not yet learned the needful self-abandonment to receive the marks of Thy pencil. At last I have found Thee, my dear Master, my Teacher, my Father, my dear Love! I will be Thy disciple; I will learn in no other school but Thine. I return like the prodigal hungering for Thy bread. I abandon the ideas which only serve to gratify my curiosity. I will no longer seek after masters or books; no, I will use these means only as Thy divine will ordains them, and then not for my gratification, but to obey Thee by accepting all that Thou sendest me. I would confine myself solely to the duty of the present moment in order to prove my love, fulfil my obligations, and leave thee free to do with me what Thou wilt.
[Book Third.]
The Paternal Care with which God surrounds Souls wholly abandoned to Him.
[CHAPTER I.]
God Himself guides Souls who wholly abandon themselves to Him.
Sacrificate sacrificium justitiæ et sperate in Domino: Sacrifice, saith the prophet, a sacrifice of justice and hope in the Lord. That is to say that the grand and solid foundation of the spiritual life is to give one’s self to God to be the subject of His good pleasure in all things, interiorly as well as exteriorly, and to so utterly forget self that we regard it as a thing sold and delivered, to which we have no longer any right; so that our joy consists wholly in the good pleasure of God, and His honor and glory are our sole contentment.
This foundation laid, the soul has but to pass her life rejoicing that God is God, abandoning herself so completely to His good pleasure that she is equally content to do one thing as another, according as this good pleasure directs, never even pausing to reflect upon the disposition which is made of her by the will of God.
Self-abandonment! this, then, is the grand duty which remains to be fulfilled after one has faithfully acquitted himself of all the obligations of his state. The perfection with which this grand duty is accomplished is the measure of one’s sanctity.
A holy soul is a soul who, with the aid of grace, freely abandons herself to the divine will. All that follows this pure self-abandonment is the work of God and not of man. God asks nothing more of this soul than to blindly receive all that He sends, in a spirit of submission and universal indifference to the instruments of His will; the rest He determines and chooses according to His designs for the soul as an architect arranges and selects his materials according to the edifice he would construct.