The Nature of Accidie (II)

Extract

To The embers of such faults, then, he now hastens to apply a suitable remedy, and laying aside the apostolic power which he recently called into play, he turns once more to speak with the heart of a kind father or a gentle physician, and, as speaking to his children or his patients, he presents the medicine of health with words of salutary counsel, on this wise: ‘Them that are such, we command and exhort in the Lord Jesus that with quietness they work and eat their own bread’ (2 Thess. 3, 12). He has cured with the one salutary precept of work the causes of such terrible sores which spring from the root of idleness, in the manner of some most skilled physician, and he knows also that the rest of the ailments which sprout up from the same soil will straightway vanish away, when once the primordial disease has been destroyed.

If gnawing sadness once gain, by individual attacks, or in different and unseen ways, a power of mastery over our souls, it separates us ever and always from any insight of divine contemplation, and casting down the mind from whatever of purity it might possess, entirely overthrows and depresses it.