List of points

You a drifter? You… one of the crowd? You, who were born to be a leader!

There is no room among us for the lukewarm. Humble yourself and Christ will set you aflame again with the fire of Love.

Don't succumb to that disease of character whose symptoms are inconstancy in everything, thoughtlessness in action and speech scatter-brained ideas: superficiality, in short.

Mark this well: unless you react in time — not tomorrow: now! — that superficiality which each day leads you to form those empty plans (plans 'so full of emptiness') will make of your life a dead and useless puppet.

You drag along like a dead-weight, as if you had no part to play. No wonder you are beginning to feel the symptoms of lukewarmness. Wake up!

Fight against that weakness which makes you lazy and careless in your spiritual life. Remember that it might well be the beginning of lukewarmness… and, in the words of the Scripture, God will vomit the lukewarm out of his mouth.

It hurts me to see the danger of lukewarmness in which you place yourself when you do not strive seriously for perfection in your state in life.

Say with me: I don't want to be lukewarm! Confige timore tuo carnes meas, pierce thou my flesh with thy fear: grant me, my God, a filial fear that will make me react!

I already know that you avoid mortal sins. You want to be saved! But you are not worried by that constant and deliberate falling into venial sins, even though in each case you feel God's call to conquer yourself.

It is your lukewarmness that gives you this bad will.

How little Love of God you have when you yield without a fight because it is not a grave sin!

Venial sins do great harm to the soul. — Therefore God says in the Song of Songs: 'Catch the little foxes that make havoc of the vineyards'.

How sad you make me feel when you are not sorry for your venial sins! For, until you are, you will not begin to live real interior life.

You are lukewarm if you carry out lazily and reluctantly those things that have to do with our Lord; if deliberately or 'shrewdly' you look for some way of cutting down your duties; if you think only of yourself and of your comfort; if your conversations are idle and vain; if you do not abhor venial sin; if you act from human motives.

So you are bored? Naturally, if you keep your senses awake and your soul asleep.

How pathetic — a 'man of God' who has fallen away! But, how much more pathetic, a 'man of God' who is lukewarm and worldly!