Through creatures, friends, and enemies it flows plentifully; it flows over the faculties of our bodies, of our souls, and into the very centre of our hearts. Let us but open our mouths and they will be filled. The divine action floods the universe; it penetrates all creatures; it floats above them, about them; it is ever present with them; it precedes them; it accompanies them; it follows them, and they have but to allow themselves to be borne onward on its tide. Would to God kings and their ministers, princes of the Church and of the world, priests, soldiers, peasants, laborers, in a word, all men, knew how easily they can attain eminent sanctity! They have but to fulfil the simple duties of religion and their state in life, and bear with submission the crosses these duties bring, and accept with faith and love the work and suffering which unsought and unceasingly come to them through the order of Providence. This is the spirituality which sanctified the patriarchs and prophets before there were so many methods and so many masters in the spiritual life.[1] [1] It would be a gross misapprehension of the author’s words to suppose that he wishes to urge souls to enter the paths of the spiritual life without a director. He himself expressly states elsewhere that to be able to do without a director, one must have been long and skilfully directed. Still less does he wish to discourage the practices adopted by the Church for the extirpation of vice and the acquisition of virtue. What he desires to say, and what we cannot impress too much upon Christians, is that the first of all directions is the guidance of Providence, and that the most necessary and the most perfect of all practices is the faithful accomplishment and loving acceptance of all that this fatherly Providence sends us to do and suffer. This is the spirituality of all ages and of all states, which cannot be more surely sanctified, or in a manner more noble, more extraordinary, more easy, than by the simple use of that which God, the Sovereign Director of souls, gives them each moment to do or suffer. _CHAPTER IV._ Perfection does not consist in knowing the Order of God, but in submitting to it. The order of God, the good pleasure of God, the will of God, the action of God, the grace of God, all these are one and the same thing in this life. It is God laboring to render the soul like unto Him. Perfection is nothing but the soul’s faithful co-operation in this labor of God. This work is silently effected in our souls, where it thrives, increases, and is consummated unconsciously to ourselves. Theology is full of conceptions and expressions which explain the wonders of this work effected in individual souls according to their capacity.