Bad Advertisement?
Are you a Christian?
Online Store:Visit Our Store
| Chapter XIX. An illustration to help in forming an opinion on those who are only patient when they are not tried by any one.
PREVIOUS SECTION - NEXT SECTION - HELP 
Chapter XIX.
An illustration to help in forming an opinion on those
who are only patient when they are not tried by any one.
But it is like all
poisonous kinds of serpents or of wild beasts, which, while they remain
in solitude and their own lairs, are still not harmless;945
| 945 Reading non
innoxia (Petschenig). | for they cannot really be said to be
harmless, because they are not actually hurting anybody. For this
results in their case, not from any feeling of goodness, but from the
exigencies of solitude, and when they have secured an opportunity of
hurting some one, at once they produce the poison stored up in them,
and show the ferocity of their nature. And so in the case of men who
are aiming at perfection, it is not enough not to be angry with
men. For we recollect that when we were living in solitude a
feeling of irritation would creep over us against our pen because it
was too large or too small; against our penknife when it cut badly and
with a blunt edge what we wanted cut; and against a flint if by chance
when we were rather late and hurrying to the reading, a spark of fire
flashed out, so that we could not remove
and get rid of our perturbation of mind except
by cursing the senseless matter, or at least the devil. Wherefore for a
method of perfection it will not be of any use for there to be a dearth
of men against whom our anger might be roused: since, if patience has
not already been acquired, the feelings of passion which still dwell in
our hearts can equally well spend themselves on dumb things and paltry
objects, and not allow us to gain a continuous state of peacefulness,
or to be free from our remaining faults: unless perhaps we think that
some advantage and a sort of cure may be gained for our passion from
the fact that inanimate and speechless things cannot possibly reply to
our curses and rage, nor provoke our ungovernable temper to break out
into a worse madness of passion.E.C.F. INDEX & SEARCH
|
