List of points

You play around with temptations, you put yourself in danger, you fool around with your sight and with your imagination, you chat about… stupidities. And then you are anxious that doubts, scruples, confusion, sadness and discouragement might assail you.

—You must admit that you are not very consistent.

Ask Jesus to grant you a Love like a purifying furnace, where your poor flesh — your poor heart — may be consumed and cleansed of all earthly miseries. Pray that it may be emptied of self and filled with him. Ask him to grant you a deep-seated aversion to all that is worldly so that you may be sustained only by Love.

The “miracle” of purity has prayer and mortification as its two points of support.

A temptation against chastity is more dangerous the more concealed it is. When it comes insidiously, it is all the more deceptive.

—Do not give in, not even with the excuse of not wanting to “seem strange”!

Holy Purity is the humility of the flesh! You asked the Lord for seven bolts on your heart. And I advised you to ask for seven bolts for your heart and eighty years of gravity as well, for your youth…

And be watchful, for a spark is much easier to extinguish than a fire. Take flight… for in this it is low cowardice to be “brave”; a roving eye… does not mean a lively spirit, but turns out to be a snare of satan.

Yet human diligence, with mortification, the cilice, disciplines and fasting are all worthless without you, my God!

This is how a confessor killed concupiscence in a sensitive soul who confessed to a certain curiosity: “Nonsense! It is just a question of male and female instincts.”

As soon as you wilfully allow a dialogue with temptation to begin, the soul is robbed of its peace, just as consent to impurity destroys grace.

He followed the way of impurity with all his body… and with all his soul. —His faith became obscured… even though he knew it is not a problem of faith.

“You told me, Father, that after my past life it is still possible to become another Saint Augustine. I don’t doubt it, and today more than yesterday I want to try to prove it.”

But you have to cut out sin courageously from the root, as the holy Bishop of Hippo did.

Yes, ask for pardon with contrition and do penance in abundance for the impure events of your past life, but don’t try to recall them.

That conversation… was as dirty as a sewer!

—It is not enough for you to take no part in it. You must show your repugnance for it strongly!

It seems as if the “spirit” were growing smaller, shrinking to a little point… And the body seems to grow and become gigantic, until it gains control. —It was for you that Saint Paul wrote: “I buffet my own body, and make it my slave; or I, who have preached to others, may myself be rejected as worthless.”