🚀 go-pugleaf

to love and to hate.

495. If it is an extraordinary blindness to live without investigating what
we are, it is a terrible one to live an evil life, while believing in God.

496. Experience makes us see an enormous difference between piety and
goodness.

497. Against those who, trusting to the mercy of God, live heedlessly,
without doing good works.--As the two sources of our sins are pride and
sloth, God has revealed to us two of His attributes to cure them, mercy and
justice. The property of justice is to humble pride, however holy may be our
works, et non intres injudicium, etc.; and the property of mercy is to
combat sloth by exhorting to good works, according to that passage: "The
goodness of God leadeth to repentance, and that other of the Ninevites: "Let
us do penance to see if peradventure He will pity us." And thus mercy is so
far from authorising slackness that it is on the contrary the quality which
formally attacks it; so that instead of saying, "If there were no mercy in
God we should have to make every kind of effort after virtue," we must say,
on the contrary, that it is because there is mercy in God that we must make
every kind of effort.

498. It is true there is difficulty in entering into godliness. But this
difficulty does not arise from the religion which begins in us, but from the
irreligion which is still there. If our senses were not opposed to
penitence, and if our corruption were not opposed to the purity of God,
there would be nothing in this painful to us. We suffer only in proportion
as the vice which is natural to us resists supernatural grace. Our heart
feels torn asunder between these opposed efforts. But it would be very
unfair to impute this violence to God, who is drawing us on, instead of