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Progress Through Mental Prayer
Discusses under 3 main headings the nature of prayer, the fundamental principles and the effect of progress on method, and the elements that make for progress. The second half treats of the more mechanical elements that go to make up prayer. Plenty of good practical direction from a master on the subject.
276 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1937
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About the author
Edward Leen
20 books5 followersFr. Edward Leen, Holy Ghost Father, was a master scholar of dogmatic and ascetical theology of the early twentieth century.
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April 23, 2022
Another triumph by Fr. Leen. Having offered readers a "why to" book in Why the Cross, Fr. Leen now offers a "how to" book in Progress Through Mental Prayer.
In the first part of the text Fr. Leen talks about the importance of mental prayer as well as that of vocal prayer and discuss the progress and fruits of such prayer in the soul. In the second part he offers a simple and straightforward method to enter into that prayer, always stressing that these are means, not ends, and that one should never be tied to the method when a conversation with Our Lord happens on its own or at any stage in the method. In the final part Fr. Leen offers a program for how to keep the fires stoked and burning: what dispositions we need to keep habitually, how to stock our mind with material for mental prayer, and how to use mortification and silence to drive us deeper into the interior castle where He awaits.
"The function of prayer (and especially of mental prayer) therefore is to transform our minds and through the transformation of our minds to effect a change in our dispositions and in our hearts." (p. 20)
"[T]he desire to acquire this mentality, the mentality of Jesus Christ, must act as a guiding and unifying principle." (p. 22-23)
"How constrained and artificial and labored are our conversations with those with whom we have little in common!" (p. 23)
"Growth in prayer is merely a growth in familiarity with God." (p. 24)
"Prayer...does not 'happen' to us...our co-operation is necessary." (p. 35)
"We must learn to speak to God independently of our tastes and feelings." (p. 36)
"[I]f we are resolute enough not to be continually oscillating between Him and creatures, prayer is easy." (p. 36)
"The petition for the things of eternal life is accompanied very often, in fact most frequently, by a keen desire and longing for things that are an impediment to that life." (p. 37)
"The truth is that men begin to find prayer a difficulty when they have begun to find God a difficulty." (p. 37)
"[S]chool oneself 'not to want' what does not lead to Him." (p. 38)
"[P]rayer in its essence is not a mere reflection on a subject belonging to the order of divine things. 'It is a supernatural attitude of the soul before its Creator in which it directs itself toward God and unites itself with Him, for the purpose of rendering Him what is due to Him from His creatures, receiving in turn His communications and rendering itself pleasing in His sight." (p. 49)
"His way of acting and thinking is what is most deserving of our imitation." (p. 49)
"There can be union only between being that are alike; to be united with God we must be like Him, assimilated to Him, conformed in the passions and affections of our humanity to the passions and affections of that Humanity which He made His own." (p. 52)
"He speaks to us through the deepening of our faith, through the illumination He supplies to our intelligence, to the penetration into the mysteries of our religion that He grants us, and through the impulse to good that He gives to our wills." (p. 55)
(what mental prayer can do) "[C]reate in us those conditions of human mind and heart, which are the conditions of the inflow of the Divine into us through the Sacraments." (p. 63)
"We do not get virtues or lose vices merely for the asking." (p. 64)
(we must) "[R]eplace our natural views by the views of Jesus Christ and to substitute for our natural life, His mode of life." (p. 64)
"We pray not to dispose God to give, but to prepare ourselves to receive — to receive that plenitude of Divine life which is in Christ Jesus Our Lord." (p. 65)
"Without deliberately formulating it as a theory, the average person practically works out a comfortable kind of Gospel for himself..." (p. 68)
(quoting St. Teresa of Avila) "We have been so accustomed to follow every whim and fancy, to gratify ourselves in all that we consider not positively sinful..." (p. 69)
"To extirpate a vice requires a constant unremitting reaction against its activity, by continual exercise of the acts of the opposite virtue." (p. 70)
"The habits created by years of the self-indulgence of a worldly life do not disappear in the fervor of a well-made retreat." (p. 71)
"If we seek for a 'life that is truly life' — and that is what we are really seeking — we must give up looking for it in the eating of bread, that is, in the pursuit of those things that are agreeable to the appetite of the natural man." (p. 76)
"The successful effort to wear a smiling countenance induces an inner disposition of pleasantness and amiability." (p. 78)
"The exterior will finally affect the interior; the old habits will wither away and I shall end by finding satisfaction in God alone." (p. 80)
"[T]he habit of self-will and self-indulgence is rooted out only by a long course of self-denial." (p. 83)
"It is given clearly to understand that the Lord will not have a divided heart and that His love demands perfect detachment." (p. 86)
"As long as we are lovers of self in our tendency towards God, there is danger that the affection we contract for creatures will be inordinate." (p. 91)
"We attach ourselves to creatures without danger when we are perfectly detached from them and from ourselves." (p. 91)
(quoting St. John of the Cross) "The immense treasures of God can only be contained in a heart which is empty and solitary." (p. 92)
"The soul has now taken its own worthlessness for granted, and is no longer so much enamored with the idea or prospect of its own excellence." (p. 96)
(regarding the soul) "It now perceives how its every act has an effect on its own state, and makes for or mars its growth in supernatural life." (p. 101)
(as the soul makes progress) "Creatures have not only lost the power to attract; they have lost also the faculty to wound." (p. 107)
"The soul that seeks to be perfect must consent to be nothing." (p. 116)
"When the soul, in its earnest pursuit of God has allowed this last citadel in it to yield to grace, the citadel of that pride by which a man obstinately resists being nothing in the eyes of men — when it has attained this degree of humility, then it is perfectly prepared for that direct divine action on it, which prepares the way for close, intimate, and habitual union with God." (p. 119)
"Nothing but God and the life of God can enter into the human soul, and therefore, nothing but God can still its restlessness." (p. 126)
"[E]verything in itself that prevents the completeness of this possession of itself by God should disappear..." (p. 127)
"These transient visitations of God must be for a memory and a help to walk with courage in the way of self-denial when the light goes out and is replaced by the obscurity of faith." (p. 139)
"We must be content to see no one, only Jesus in His life and actions, and be satisfied with walking in His footsteps in simplicity, humility and self-denial." (p. 139)
"It is knowing a God as a child knows its own parent, not knowing a great deal about God, that sanctifies the soul." (p. 145)
"We remember what concerns us: our thoughts turn towards what interests us and our imagination busies itself with what flatters us." (p. 154)
(the soul) "It must say to itself constantly: 'I must have God at all costs.'" (p. 155)
"[T]he acquisition of a taste for spiritual knowledge involves self-conquest." (p. 157)
"To allow ourselves to act with too much eagerness in anything is to surrender ourselves to the matter in which we are interested." (p. 159)
"Excitement is fatal to prayer." (p. 159)
"We should, with all possible tranquillity of spirit, and without any violent efforts of memory, strive to keep the subject of next day's prayer uppermost in our minds when retiring." (p. 165)
"Each morning's exercise of meditation is an important event in our lives." (p. 166)
"Every fresh conversation we have with a person in whom we are interested, whom we like and whose acquaintance we are cultivating, makes us grow in intimacy with, and in knowledge of, that person. The same effect is produced by our conversations with Our Lord in prayer. Every morning's meeting with Him should be looked forward to by us as something new, fresh, and interesting in our lives, as something fraught with great possibilities for us." (p. 166)
"We know that God cannot love except Himself; He can love us then, only in so far as He finds Himself in us." (p. 173)
(regarding our resolutions from meditation) "[T]o strive to imitate Our Divine Lord in His ways of life...to determine to reproduce the features of His conduct in some selected circumstance of our life, where we signally fail." (p. 184)
"[W]e should not allow any undue familiarity to appear in our relations with our Creator." (p. 185)
"In all our interchanges of thought and affection with God, we must ever have before our eyes our sinfulness and infidelity." (p. 191)
(activities that can be helpful in meditation) "...a consideration of our guilt before, and ingratitude towards, God: regret that our sorrow is so imperfect and so wanting in divine love: a desire that we should have a truly humble and contrite heart, and a yearning for pardon and for the grace of amendment." (p. 192)
"There are numbers of Christians around about...given the same opportunities...perhapse more deserving...oftentimes endowed with much finer natural disposition, who are, nevertheless, destined to remain during their whole life only on the borders of the supernatural world." (p. 194)
(quoting Bossuet) "The greater its knowledge of God is, the purer will be its love, the more upright its intention, the more pronounced its hatred for sin, the more thorough its recollection, the more sustained its humility and mortification..." (p. 197)
"It is most important to aim at loving only God, and severing every tie of which the Divine Master is not the beginning and the end." (p. 204)
"The soul possessed of true devotion is not content merely with carrying out God's orders, it aims at forestalling His wishes." (p. 207)
"Blindness as to what we really are, can prove a great obstacle to our progress." (p. 208)
(regarding the liturgy) "The soul that is possessed by it finds therein the great lever by which it is lifted above that preoccupation about self which is the chief obstacle to progress." (p. 211)
"If worldly pursuits, worldly interests, mere natural and material things absorb our attention, and are the main theme of such reading as we indulge in, it is inevitable that our reflections will take the color of these preoccupations and interests when we set ourselves to prayer." (p. 214)
"If we wish to dwell easily on supernatural things our memories must be stored with them." (p. 215)
"A Saint is a moral work of art, a finished product of personally controlled and personally directed actions. The art of sanctity has its fixed principles as have the fine arts." (p. 215)
"Spiritual reading has no other purpose than to store our minds with ideas and our imaginations with images pertaining to the supernatural order." (p. 216)
"It is not an easy things for us to think supernaturally, and an occasional look into a spiritual book will not be sufficient to develop in us the habit of doing so." (p. 217)
"Christians are obliged to live and move in an atmosphere saturated with worldliness, in a world in which almost every appreciation of things is at variance with the appreciations of Jesus Christ, and their judgments cannot remain unaffected by the prevailing tone and tendency of the environment unless a steady corrective be applied." (p. 218)
"The gospel of the world formulates its own beatitudes...'Blessed are they that have a good time.' 'Blessed are they that have enough of wealth to satisfy every whim.' 'Blessed are they that can have their own way in all things and can crush opposition.'" (p. 219)
"There is...a decided tendency in us to look at things and judge of them in a purely natural manner." (p. 220)
(what we must desire) "...not to be well off in this world, but to be well established in the state of grace, to be well with God." (p. 220)
"[T]he accomplishment of God's will and not the gratification of our own is the chief business of life." (p. 220)
"[A] man's greatness consists not in wealth or power or honor, but in that degree of divine charity with which his soul is informed." (p. 220)
"The reading of the lives of the Saints saves us from the danger of believing that the gospel outlines an ideal which is practically impossible." (p. 221)
"What is bad or of dangerous tendency must be wholly shunned by all who aspire even to an ordinary christian life." (p. 225)
"[E]verything taken into their hands with a view to affording mental relaxation should tend at the same time to elevate and ennoble the mind." (p. 225)
"Interior souls should beware of making the perusal of romantic literature a recreation: they should give themselves to it as to a task and regret the time that may have to be spent in it." (p. 227)
"When our thoughts are by constant reading steeped in the thoughts of God and divine things, it will be easy for us to think of Him, and it will come natural and easy for us to speak to Hima nd to speak of Him out of our full hearts and well-stored minds." (p. 227)
"The mere exercise of the intellect on questions that concern the objects of faith does not, of itself, steep the soul in a supernatural atmosphere." (p. 228)
"We are to imitate the Saints in their endeavor to reproduce in their own lives the traits of the life of Jesus." (p. 231)
"There is no possibility of receiving His life in our members unless the activity of corrupt nature in those members is paralyzed by self-inflicted privation." (p. 238)
"We are tempted to pursue not what we ought, but what holds out promise of pleasure." (p. 239)
"The body will not be a good servant until it has been consistently deprived of what it has strictly a right to." (p. 240)
"Self-indulgence promises happiness, but provides nothing but restlessness and discontent and disillusionment." (p. 241)
"[C]orrupt nature even when yielding to necessity will seek compensation for what it surrenders." (p. 242)
"[W]e should withhold (our eyes) from regarding any creature the contemplation of which might excited undue disturbances in our imagination." (p. 246)
"We should curb our desire to hear, when we expect that what we are to listen to will provide food for our vanity or our self-love." (p. 246)
"To seek for news is merely to open a wide gate to a multitude of distractions." (p. 247)
"The mortified Christian is sparing in his use of condiments, and takes what is good for him rather than that which merely pleases the palate." (p. 248)
"We should forbid ourselves any touch that has no other end but to yield a sensible gratification — even though that gratification may not be sinful." (p. 249)
"We must not seek to taste what is in anticipation nor savor what is past." (p. 250)
"It is a defect to use our imagination for calling up pleasant sights or scenes or associations especially those that flatter self-love or sensuality." (p. 250)
"The tongue serves to manifest the thoughts of our minds and the determination of our wills." (p. 261)
"There is in fallen man a tendency to seek satisfaction for satisfaction's sake." (p. 264)
"It is pride more often than the zeal for truth, that urges us to bring those with whom we converse to see things as we see them." (p. 265)
"The tongue is given to us to glorify God, but it tends to glorify self. It must therefore be denied every gratification in that direction." (p. 269)
(quoting St. Gregory) "For a man given to talk will never make any great progress in virtue." (p. 270)
"We cultivate silence in order to be able to speak with and to hear God easily." (p. 273)
"The rule is, never to speak merely for one's own sake or for one's own gratification, or to satisfy some impulse, but solely for the glory of God, for the right accomplishment of duty, for the promotion of truth, for the exercise of charity, for the comfort of the sorrowful and for the purpose of brightening the life of one's fellows." (p. 274)
In the first part of the text Fr. Leen talks about the importance of mental prayer as well as that of vocal prayer and discuss the progress and fruits of such prayer in the soul. In the second part he offers a simple and straightforward method to enter into that prayer, always stressing that these are means, not ends, and that one should never be tied to the method when a conversation with Our Lord happens on its own or at any stage in the method. In the final part Fr. Leen offers a program for how to keep the fires stoked and burning: what dispositions we need to keep habitually, how to stock our mind with material for mental prayer, and how to use mortification and silence to drive us deeper into the interior castle where He awaits.
"The function of prayer (and especially of mental prayer) therefore is to transform our minds and through the transformation of our minds to effect a change in our dispositions and in our hearts." (p. 20)
"[T]he desire to acquire this mentality, the mentality of Jesus Christ, must act as a guiding and unifying principle." (p. 22-23)
"How constrained and artificial and labored are our conversations with those with whom we have little in common!" (p. 23)
"Growth in prayer is merely a growth in familiarity with God." (p. 24)
"Prayer...does not 'happen' to us...our co-operation is necessary." (p. 35)
"We must learn to speak to God independently of our tastes and feelings." (p. 36)
"[I]f we are resolute enough not to be continually oscillating between Him and creatures, prayer is easy." (p. 36)
"The petition for the things of eternal life is accompanied very often, in fact most frequently, by a keen desire and longing for things that are an impediment to that life." (p. 37)
"The truth is that men begin to find prayer a difficulty when they have begun to find God a difficulty." (p. 37)
"[S]chool oneself 'not to want' what does not lead to Him." (p. 38)
"[P]rayer in its essence is not a mere reflection on a subject belonging to the order of divine things. 'It is a supernatural attitude of the soul before its Creator in which it directs itself toward God and unites itself with Him, for the purpose of rendering Him what is due to Him from His creatures, receiving in turn His communications and rendering itself pleasing in His sight." (p. 49)
"His way of acting and thinking is what is most deserving of our imitation." (p. 49)
"There can be union only between being that are alike; to be united with God we must be like Him, assimilated to Him, conformed in the passions and affections of our humanity to the passions and affections of that Humanity which He made His own." (p. 52)
"He speaks to us through the deepening of our faith, through the illumination He supplies to our intelligence, to the penetration into the mysteries of our religion that He grants us, and through the impulse to good that He gives to our wills." (p. 55)
(what mental prayer can do) "[C]reate in us those conditions of human mind and heart, which are the conditions of the inflow of the Divine into us through the Sacraments." (p. 63)
"We do not get virtues or lose vices merely for the asking." (p. 64)
(we must) "[R]eplace our natural views by the views of Jesus Christ and to substitute for our natural life, His mode of life." (p. 64)
"We pray not to dispose God to give, but to prepare ourselves to receive — to receive that plenitude of Divine life which is in Christ Jesus Our Lord." (p. 65)
"Without deliberately formulating it as a theory, the average person practically works out a comfortable kind of Gospel for himself..." (p. 68)
(quoting St. Teresa of Avila) "We have been so accustomed to follow every whim and fancy, to gratify ourselves in all that we consider not positively sinful..." (p. 69)
"To extirpate a vice requires a constant unremitting reaction against its activity, by continual exercise of the acts of the opposite virtue." (p. 70)
"The habits created by years of the self-indulgence of a worldly life do not disappear in the fervor of a well-made retreat." (p. 71)
"If we seek for a 'life that is truly life' — and that is what we are really seeking — we must give up looking for it in the eating of bread, that is, in the pursuit of those things that are agreeable to the appetite of the natural man." (p. 76)
"The successful effort to wear a smiling countenance induces an inner disposition of pleasantness and amiability." (p. 78)
"The exterior will finally affect the interior; the old habits will wither away and I shall end by finding satisfaction in God alone." (p. 80)
"[T]he habit of self-will and self-indulgence is rooted out only by a long course of self-denial." (p. 83)
"It is given clearly to understand that the Lord will not have a divided heart and that His love demands perfect detachment." (p. 86)
"As long as we are lovers of self in our tendency towards God, there is danger that the affection we contract for creatures will be inordinate." (p. 91)
"We attach ourselves to creatures without danger when we are perfectly detached from them and from ourselves." (p. 91)
(quoting St. John of the Cross) "The immense treasures of God can only be contained in a heart which is empty and solitary." (p. 92)
"The soul has now taken its own worthlessness for granted, and is no longer so much enamored with the idea or prospect of its own excellence." (p. 96)
(regarding the soul) "It now perceives how its every act has an effect on its own state, and makes for or mars its growth in supernatural life." (p. 101)
(as the soul makes progress) "Creatures have not only lost the power to attract; they have lost also the faculty to wound." (p. 107)
"The soul that seeks to be perfect must consent to be nothing." (p. 116)
"When the soul, in its earnest pursuit of God has allowed this last citadel in it to yield to grace, the citadel of that pride by which a man obstinately resists being nothing in the eyes of men — when it has attained this degree of humility, then it is perfectly prepared for that direct divine action on it, which prepares the way for close, intimate, and habitual union with God." (p. 119)
"Nothing but God and the life of God can enter into the human soul, and therefore, nothing but God can still its restlessness." (p. 126)
"[E]verything in itself that prevents the completeness of this possession of itself by God should disappear..." (p. 127)
"These transient visitations of God must be for a memory and a help to walk with courage in the way of self-denial when the light goes out and is replaced by the obscurity of faith." (p. 139)
"We must be content to see no one, only Jesus in His life and actions, and be satisfied with walking in His footsteps in simplicity, humility and self-denial." (p. 139)
"It is knowing a God as a child knows its own parent, not knowing a great deal about God, that sanctifies the soul." (p. 145)
"We remember what concerns us: our thoughts turn towards what interests us and our imagination busies itself with what flatters us." (p. 154)
(the soul) "It must say to itself constantly: 'I must have God at all costs.'" (p. 155)
"[T]he acquisition of a taste for spiritual knowledge involves self-conquest." (p. 157)
"To allow ourselves to act with too much eagerness in anything is to surrender ourselves to the matter in which we are interested." (p. 159)
"Excitement is fatal to prayer." (p. 159)
"We should, with all possible tranquillity of spirit, and without any violent efforts of memory, strive to keep the subject of next day's prayer uppermost in our minds when retiring." (p. 165)
"Each morning's exercise of meditation is an important event in our lives." (p. 166)
"Every fresh conversation we have with a person in whom we are interested, whom we like and whose acquaintance we are cultivating, makes us grow in intimacy with, and in knowledge of, that person. The same effect is produced by our conversations with Our Lord in prayer. Every morning's meeting with Him should be looked forward to by us as something new, fresh, and interesting in our lives, as something fraught with great possibilities for us." (p. 166)
"We know that God cannot love except Himself; He can love us then, only in so far as He finds Himself in us." (p. 173)
(regarding our resolutions from meditation) "[T]o strive to imitate Our Divine Lord in His ways of life...to determine to reproduce the features of His conduct in some selected circumstance of our life, where we signally fail." (p. 184)
"[W]e should not allow any undue familiarity to appear in our relations with our Creator." (p. 185)
"In all our interchanges of thought and affection with God, we must ever have before our eyes our sinfulness and infidelity." (p. 191)
(activities that can be helpful in meditation) "...a consideration of our guilt before, and ingratitude towards, God: regret that our sorrow is so imperfect and so wanting in divine love: a desire that we should have a truly humble and contrite heart, and a yearning for pardon and for the grace of amendment." (p. 192)
"There are numbers of Christians around about...given the same opportunities...perhapse more deserving...oftentimes endowed with much finer natural disposition, who are, nevertheless, destined to remain during their whole life only on the borders of the supernatural world." (p. 194)
(quoting Bossuet) "The greater its knowledge of God is, the purer will be its love, the more upright its intention, the more pronounced its hatred for sin, the more thorough its recollection, the more sustained its humility and mortification..." (p. 197)
"It is most important to aim at loving only God, and severing every tie of which the Divine Master is not the beginning and the end." (p. 204)
"The soul possessed of true devotion is not content merely with carrying out God's orders, it aims at forestalling His wishes." (p. 207)
"Blindness as to what we really are, can prove a great obstacle to our progress." (p. 208)
(regarding the liturgy) "The soul that is possessed by it finds therein the great lever by which it is lifted above that preoccupation about self which is the chief obstacle to progress." (p. 211)
"If worldly pursuits, worldly interests, mere natural and material things absorb our attention, and are the main theme of such reading as we indulge in, it is inevitable that our reflections will take the color of these preoccupations and interests when we set ourselves to prayer." (p. 214)
"If we wish to dwell easily on supernatural things our memories must be stored with them." (p. 215)
"A Saint is a moral work of art, a finished product of personally controlled and personally directed actions. The art of sanctity has its fixed principles as have the fine arts." (p. 215)
"Spiritual reading has no other purpose than to store our minds with ideas and our imaginations with images pertaining to the supernatural order." (p. 216)
"It is not an easy things for us to think supernaturally, and an occasional look into a spiritual book will not be sufficient to develop in us the habit of doing so." (p. 217)
"Christians are obliged to live and move in an atmosphere saturated with worldliness, in a world in which almost every appreciation of things is at variance with the appreciations of Jesus Christ, and their judgments cannot remain unaffected by the prevailing tone and tendency of the environment unless a steady corrective be applied." (p. 218)
"The gospel of the world formulates its own beatitudes...'Blessed are they that have a good time.' 'Blessed are they that have enough of wealth to satisfy every whim.' 'Blessed are they that can have their own way in all things and can crush opposition.'" (p. 219)
"There is...a decided tendency in us to look at things and judge of them in a purely natural manner." (p. 220)
(what we must desire) "...not to be well off in this world, but to be well established in the state of grace, to be well with God." (p. 220)
"[T]he accomplishment of God's will and not the gratification of our own is the chief business of life." (p. 220)
"[A] man's greatness consists not in wealth or power or honor, but in that degree of divine charity with which his soul is informed." (p. 220)
"The reading of the lives of the Saints saves us from the danger of believing that the gospel outlines an ideal which is practically impossible." (p. 221)
"What is bad or of dangerous tendency must be wholly shunned by all who aspire even to an ordinary christian life." (p. 225)
"[E]verything taken into their hands with a view to affording mental relaxation should tend at the same time to elevate and ennoble the mind." (p. 225)
"Interior souls should beware of making the perusal of romantic literature a recreation: they should give themselves to it as to a task and regret the time that may have to be spent in it." (p. 227)
"When our thoughts are by constant reading steeped in the thoughts of God and divine things, it will be easy for us to think of Him, and it will come natural and easy for us to speak to Hima nd to speak of Him out of our full hearts and well-stored minds." (p. 227)
"The mere exercise of the intellect on questions that concern the objects of faith does not, of itself, steep the soul in a supernatural atmosphere." (p. 228)
"We are to imitate the Saints in their endeavor to reproduce in their own lives the traits of the life of Jesus." (p. 231)
"There is no possibility of receiving His life in our members unless the activity of corrupt nature in those members is paralyzed by self-inflicted privation." (p. 238)
"We are tempted to pursue not what we ought, but what holds out promise of pleasure." (p. 239)
"The body will not be a good servant until it has been consistently deprived of what it has strictly a right to." (p. 240)
"Self-indulgence promises happiness, but provides nothing but restlessness and discontent and disillusionment." (p. 241)
"[C]orrupt nature even when yielding to necessity will seek compensation for what it surrenders." (p. 242)
"[W]e should withhold (our eyes) from regarding any creature the contemplation of which might excited undue disturbances in our imagination." (p. 246)
"We should curb our desire to hear, when we expect that what we are to listen to will provide food for our vanity or our self-love." (p. 246)
"To seek for news is merely to open a wide gate to a multitude of distractions." (p. 247)
"The mortified Christian is sparing in his use of condiments, and takes what is good for him rather than that which merely pleases the palate." (p. 248)
"We should forbid ourselves any touch that has no other end but to yield a sensible gratification — even though that gratification may not be sinful." (p. 249)
"We must not seek to taste what is in anticipation nor savor what is past." (p. 250)
"It is a defect to use our imagination for calling up pleasant sights or scenes or associations especially those that flatter self-love or sensuality." (p. 250)
"The tongue serves to manifest the thoughts of our minds and the determination of our wills." (p. 261)
"There is in fallen man a tendency to seek satisfaction for satisfaction's sake." (p. 264)
"It is pride more often than the zeal for truth, that urges us to bring those with whom we converse to see things as we see them." (p. 265)
"The tongue is given to us to glorify God, but it tends to glorify self. It must therefore be denied every gratification in that direction." (p. 269)
(quoting St. Gregory) "For a man given to talk will never make any great progress in virtue." (p. 270)
"We cultivate silence in order to be able to speak with and to hear God easily." (p. 273)
"The rule is, never to speak merely for one's own sake or for one's own gratification, or to satisfy some impulse, but solely for the glory of God, for the right accomplishment of duty, for the promotion of truth, for the exercise of charity, for the comfort of the sorrowful and for the purpose of brightening the life of one's fellows." (p. 274)
March 25, 2023
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