7. _Much intercourse with God_; speaking to Him with simplicity, loving Him dearly, always consulting Him, rendering to Him an account of every action, thanking Him constantly, and above all, drawing near to Him with joy in the Holy Eucharist. One great help towards such sweet communion with GOD, will be found in a steady perseverance in the early morning's meditation. 8. _Much love for our neighbor_, because he is the much-loved child of GOD, praying for him, comforting, teaching, strengthening, and helping him in all difficulties. * * * * * HINDRANCES TO THE INTERIOR LIFE 1. _Natural activity_, always urging us on, and making us too precipitate in all our actions. It shows itself:-- _In our projects_, which it multiplies, heaps up, reforms, and upsets. It allows of no rest, until what it has undertaken is accomplished. _In our actions._ Activity is absolutely necessary to us. We load ourselves with a thousand things beyond our duty, sometimes even contrary to it. Everything is done with impetuosity and haste, anxiety and impatience to see the end. _In our conversation._ Activity makes us speak without thinking, interrupting rudely, reproving hastily, judging without appreciation. We speak loudly, disputing, murmuring, and losing our temper. _In prayer._ We burden ourselves with numberless prayers, repeated carelessly, without attention, and with impatience to get to the end of them; it interferes with our meditations, wearies, torments, fatigues the brain, drying up the soul, and hindering the work of the HOLY SPIRIT. 2. _Curiosity_ lays the soul open to all external things, fills it with a thousand fancies and questionings, pleasing or vexatious, absorbing the mind, and making it quite impossible to retire within one's self and be recollected. Then follow distaste, sloth, and ennui for all that savors of silence, retirement, and meditation. Curiosity shows itself, when _studies_ are undertaken from vanity, a desire to know all things, and to pass as clever, rather than the real wish to learn in order to be useful--in _reading_, when the spare time is given up to history, papers, and novels--in _walking_, when our steps would lead us where the crowd go to see, to know, only in order to have something to retail; in fact, it manifests itself in a thousand little actions; for instance, pressing forward with feverish haste to open a letter addressed to us, longing eagerly to see anything that presents itself, always being the first to tell any piece of news.... When we forget GOD, He is driven from the heart, leaving it void, and then ensues that wild craving to fill up the void with anything with which we may come into contact.