List of points

I advise you to try sometime to return… to the beginning of your first conversion, which, if it is not becoming like children, is very much like it. In the spiritual life we have to let ourselves be led with complete trust, single-mindedly and without fear. We have to speak with absolute clarity about what we have in our mind and in our soul.

How are you going to get out of that state of lukewarmness and lamentable languor if you do not make use of the means? You struggle very little, and when you make an effort, you do so as if annoyed and uneasy. You even seem to hope that your feeble efforts will produce no results, so that you can then justify yourself and you will not have to make demands on yourself and others will not ask any more of you.

—It is your own will you are following, not God’s. If you don’t change in earnest you will neither be happy nor be able to obtain the peace you now lack.

—Humble yourself before God, and try really to want to.

Nunc coepi! — now I begin! This is the cry of a soul in love which, at every moment, whether it has been faithful or lacking in generosity, renews its desire to serve — to love! — our God with a wholehearted loyalty.

Change now, when you still feel young… How difficult it is to put things right when the soul has aged.

To be converted you must climb via humility, along the path of self-abasement.

“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.