List of points

Get rid of that 'small-town' outlook. Enlarge your heart till it becomes universal, 'catholic'.

Don't flutter about like a hen, when you can soar to the heights of an eagle.

Your mind is sluggish: you try to collect your thoughts in God's presence, but it's useless: there's a complete blank.

Don't try to force yourself, and don't worry. Look: such moments are for your heart.

The battle front. A group of some twenty officers, singing together in gay and noble comradeship. The songs come quickly, one after another.

That young lieutenant with the brown moustache only heard the first:

'I have no use

for divided hearts:

I give mine whole,

and not in parts.'

'What reluctance to give my whole heart!' And his prayer rose up in a broad and peaceful flow.

Put your heart aside. Duty comes first. But, when fulfilling your duty, put your heart into it. It helps.

A missionary. — You dream of being a missionary. Another Francis Xavier… And you long to conquer an empire for Christ. Japan, China, India, Russia… the peoples of the North of Europe, or America, or Africa, or Australia?

Stir up that fire in your heart, that hunger for souls. But don't forget that you are more of a missionary 'obeying'. Geographically distant from those apostolic fields, you work both 'here' and 'there': don't you — like Xavier — feel your arm tired after administering baptism to so many?

To be 'Catholic' means to love your country and to be second to no one in that love. And at the same time, to hold as your own the noble aspirations of other lands. — So many glories of France are glories of mine! And in the same way, much that makes Germans proud, and the peoples of Italy and of England…, and Americans and Asians and Africans, is a source of pride to me also.

Catholic: big heart, broad mind.

The closer an apostle is to God, the more universal his desires. His heart expands and takes in everybody and everything in its longing to lay the universe at the feet of Jesus.

Indifference is not dryness of heart, as the heart of Jesus was not dry.

I can understand how you are suffering when, in the midst of that enforced inactivity, you consider the work still to be done. Your heart would break the bounds of the universe, and it has to adapt itself to… an insignificant routine job.

But, tell me, for when do we keep our fiat, 'Thy will be done'?…

May I never see 'cliques' developing in your work. It would make a mockery of the apostolate: for if, in the end, the 'clique' got

control of a universal undertaking, how quickly that universal undertaking would be reduced to a clique itself!

Rejoice, when you see others working in good apostolic activities. And ask God to grant them abundant grace and that they may respond to that grace.

Then, you, on your way: convince yourself that it's the only way for you.

You show bad spirit if it hurts you to see others work for Christ without regard for what you are doing. Remember this passage in Saint Mark: 'Master, we saw a man who is not one of us casting out devils in your name; and because he was not one of us we tried to stop him.' But Jesus said, 'You must not stop him: no one who works a miracle in my name is likely to speak evil of me. Anyone who is not against us is for us'.