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The life of a man who, spent out, lies dying little
by little on his bed, hardly deserves to be termed
life, since, though it be life, it is so mingled with
death that it is hard to say whether it is a death
yet living or a life dying. Alas! how pitiful a
spectacle it is, Theotimus!
But far more lamentable is the state of a soul
ungrateful to her Saviour, who goes backward step by
step, withdrawing herself from God's love by certain
degrees of indevotion and disloyalty, till at length,
having quite forsaken it, she is left in the horrible
obscurity of perdition. This love which is in its
decline, and which is fading and perishing, is called
imperfect love, because, though it be entire in the
soul, yet seems it not to be there entirely; that is,
it hardly stays in the soul any longer, but is upon
the point of forsaking it.
Now, charity being separated from the soul by sin,
there frequently remains a certain resemblance of
charity which may deceive us and vainly occupy our
minds, and I will tell you what it is. Charity while
it is in us produces many actions of love towards
God, by the frequent exercise of which our soul gets
a habit and custom of loving God, which is not
charity, but only a bent and inclination which the
multitude of the actions has given to our hearts.
After a long habit of preaching or saying Mass with
deliberation, it happens often that in dreaming we
utter and speak the same things which we should say
in preaching or celebrating; in the same manner the
custom and habit acquired by election and virtue is,
in some sort, afterwards practised without election
or virtues since the actions of those who are asleep
have, generally speaking, nothing of virtue save only
an apparent image, and are only the similitudes or
representations thereof.
So charity, by the multitude of acts which it
produces, imprints in us a certain facility in loving
which it leaves in us even after we are deprived of
its presence. When I was a young scholar, I found
that in a village near Paris, in a certain well,
there was an echo, which would repeat several times
the words that we pronounced in it: and if some
simpleton without experience had heard these
repetitions of words, he would have thought there was
some one at the bottom of the well who did it. But we
knew beforehand by philosophy that it was not any one
in the well who repeated our words, but simply that
there were cavities, in one of which our voices were
collected, and not finding a passage through, they,
lest they might altogether perish and not employ the
force that was left to them, produced second voices,
and these gathering together in another concavity
produced a third, the third a fourth, and so
consecutively up to eleven, so that those voices in
the well were no longer our voices, but resemblances
and images of them.
And indeed there was a great difference between
our voices and those: for when we made a long
continuance of words, they only repeated some, they
shortened the pronunciation of the syllables, which
they uttered very rapidly; and with tones and accents
quite different from ours; nor did they begin to form
these words until we had quite finished pronouncing
them.
In fine, they were not the words of a living man,
but, so to say, of a hollow and empty rock, which
notwithstanding so well counterfeited man's voice
whence they sprang, that an ignorant person would
have been misled and beguiled by them.
Now this is what I would say. When holy charity meets
a pliable soul in which she long resides, she
produces a second love, which is not a love of
charity, though it issues from charity; it is a human
love which is yet so like charity, that though
afterwards charity perish in the soul it seems to be
still there, inasmuch as it leaves behind it this its
picture and likeness, which so represents charity
that one who was ignorant would be deceived therein,
as were the birds by the painting of the grapes of
Zeuxis, which they deemed to be true grapes, so
exactly had art imitated nature.
And yet there is a great difference between
charity and the human love it produces in us: for the
voice of charity declares, impresses, and effects all
the commandments of God in our hearts; the human love
which remains after it does indeed sometimes declare
and impress all the commandments, yet it never
effects them all, but some few only.
Charity pronounces and puts together all the
syllables, that is, all the circumstances of God's
commandments; human love always leaves out some of
them, especially that of the right and pure
intention; and as for the tone, charity keeps it
always steady, sweet, and full of grace, human love
takes it always too high in earthly things, or too
low in heavenly, and never sets upon its work until
charity has ended hers.
For so long as charity is in the soul, she uses
this human love which is her creature and employs it
to facilitate her operations; so that during that
time the works of this love, as of a servant, belong
to charity its mistress: but when charity is gone,
then the actions of this love are entirely its own,
and have no longer the price and value of charity.
For as the staff of Eliseus, in his absence,
though in the hand of Giezi who received it from him,
wrought no miracle, so actions done in the absence of
charity, by the simple habit of human loves are of no
value or merit to eternal life, though this human
love learned from charity to do them, and is but
charity's servant. And this so comes about because
this human love, in the absence of charity, has no
supernatural strength to raise the soul to the
excellent action of the love of God above all things.
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