[[8]] 2 Thess. ii, 12.
[[9]] Rom. vii, 21-23.
[[10]] Scupoli, The Spiritual Combat (Pusey's Trans.), chap. xii.
St. Francis de Sales, in a letter to the Mère de Chastel, has a delightfully characteristic passage, full of paternal tenderness combined with playful and reverent humour, in which he sets forth the mode of action of the two wills. "Indeed, my dear daughter Marie," he writes, "you say truly that there are two beings in you. The one is a Marie who, like St. Peter, is tender, sensitive, ready to be irritated by a touch. This Marie is a daughter of Eve, and so her temper is frail. The other Marie wills to be wholly God's; and in order so to be, she wills in all simplicity to be humble and gentle towards everyone, and she would fain imitate St. Peter after he was converted. This Marie is the child of the Blessed Virgin. These two diverse Maries come into collision, and the bad one is so bad that often the other scarce knows how to defend herself, and then perforce she fancies herself beaten, and believes the bad Marie to be stronger. But not so, my poor, dear child; the bad one is not stronger than you. She is more perverse, more enterprising, more obstinate, and when you lose heart and sit down to cry, she is pleased because it is so much time lost for you; and if she cannot make you lose eternity, at all events she will try to make you lose time. My dear daughter, rouse your courage ... be watchful of your enemy; tread cautiously for fear of the foe; if you are not on your guard against her she will be too much for you. Even if she should take you by surprise, and make you totter, or give you a slight wound, do not be put out.... Now do not be ashamed of all this, my daughter, any more than St. Paul was when he confessed that there were two beings in him, one rebellious against God, the other obedient to Him."—St. Francis de Sales, Spiritual Letters, lvii.
[[11]] "It is impossible," says the Abbot Moses, "for the mind not to be approached by thoughts, but it is in the power of every earnest man either to admit them or reject them. Their rising does not depend upon ourselves, but their admission or rejection is in our own power.... The movement of the mind may well be illustrated by the comparison of a mill-wheel. The headlong rush of water whirls it round, and it can never stop its work so long as it is driven by the water. Yet it is in the power of the man who directs it to decide whether he will have wheat, or barley, or darnel ground by it. For it must certainly crush that which the man in charge of it puts in. So the mind is driven by the torrents of temptation which pour in on it from every side and cannot be free from the flow of thoughts, but we control the character of the thoughts by the efforts of our own earnestness."—Cassian, Conferences, I, 17, 18.
[[12]] "The power of divine grace, like that of the Adversary, is impulsive, not compulsive, that the free power of our will may be entirely preserved. Wherefore, for the evil things which a man does by the influence of Satan, it is not Satan that receives the punishment, but the man himself; forasmuch as he was not involuntarily forced into those things, but was consenting in his own will. In the same manner also with respect to what is good, Grace does not ascribe it to itself, but to the man, and it therefore assigns to him glory, as the cause of good to himself. For grace does not so constrain by compulsive force as to render a man's will incapable of altering; but though it be present to him, it gives way to his free and arbitrary power, that his will may be manifested how it is disposed to good or to evil. For the law is not applied to our nature, but to our free-will, which is able to convert itself either to good or to evil."—Macarius, Institutes of Christian Perfection, Bk. VII, chap. iii. (Penn's Trans., London, 1816.)
[[13]] Scupoli, The Spiritual Combat, chap. xiv.
[[14]] "I shall fulfil Thy Will if, for Thy Love, I contradict my own, which Thou wilt not in any way constrain, but dost leave it perfectly free that I, by voluntarily and constantly subjecting it to Thine, may become dearer and more full in Thy sight."—St. Catherine of Siena, Dialogue on Consummated Perfection, in Drane's History of St. Catherine, Vol. II, p. 348.
[[15]] Faber, Growth in Holiness, chap. xvi.
[[16]] St. Francis de Sales, Spiritual Letters, cxiv.