[26] This is especially true for religious.
[27] By this is meant that the Holy Scriptures, though always presupposed as the foundation of our belief, of themselves give only an objective knowledge of God, while that which the Holy Ghost gives is experimental.
[28] God knows and loves Himself in Himself by His own nature, while we know and love Him in Himself by grace.
[29] A very striking feature in the doctrine of this book is that it requires first the perfection of the soul and the faculties, whence proceeds that of our actions. Some modern authors, confining themselves to casuistry, speak almost exclusively of the perfection of actions, a method less logical and less thorough.
[30] Prov. viii. 31.
[31] The exterior powers of a man are the imagination and passions; the interior his intelligence and will, which sometimes find themselves deprived of all the aids of sensible devotion.
[32] In truth, all the designs of God in our regard are full of mercy, and tend especially to our sanctification; the obstacles to these designs come only from our evil passions.
[33] The book "De Spiritu et Anima" is of uncertain authorship. It is printed after the works of St. Augustine in Migne's "Patrologia Latina," vol. xl., 779.
[34] This darkness is the silence of the imagination, which no longer gains a hearing, and that of the intellect, which is sufficiently enlightened to understand that we can in reality understand nothing of the Divinity in itself, and that the best thing we can do is to remove from our conception of God all those limitations which we observe in creatures. The reason of this is that we can only know God naturally by means of what we see in creatures, and these are always utterly insufficient to give us an adequate idea of the Creator.
[35] Ps. lxxxiii. 8.