Could you but see the living tableau of one of those souls tyrannized by the imagination, the sight would arouse both your compassion and disgust; for hers is a fickle, inconstant, fretful and worried life. During the long dreary days not a single instant is completely and sincerely given to God. Her thoughts, affections, desires and occupations never rise above trivialness. Among the multitude of persons of her acquaintance there is not a single one whom she sincerely loves, or to whom she can render herself amiable. In the multiplied interviews to which she has devoted her life-time not a single genuine affection can be found: words which the lips pronounce and which the heart ignores; visits made through etiquette or inspired by frivolity; conversations that are mutually indulged in for mutual illusion or deception;--such are the joys, such the occupations, of this woman. With dispositions such as these there cannot be question of sincere piety nor of a Christian spirit. Piety resides in the will and supposes the love of duty; imagination abhors duty and seeks only after pleasure. True, the grace of God is all-powerful, it is not tied down to the development of our natural qualities, and God knows well, when He pleases, how to come to the assistance of the soul's faculties, and plant the germs of solid virtue in a heart that is frivolous and badly disposed; still it is an evident fact that among souls there are some better prepared than others to receive this divine seed, which takes deeper root when the heart is well disposed. Now, among all the agents that can unfit us for the reception of divine grace there is none so bad as an ungoverned imagination, because it is the source, especially among women, of the most fatal illusions. A woman in this condition spends her whole life-time in deceiving herself and in deceiving others--not purposely, but by a fatal and voluntary illusion; she can see nothing in its true light; all objects appear to her under strange colors; she forms her judgment of them according to the impression they make on the senses, or the effect they produce in the imagination. All this unfits her for the reception of those supernatural truths which fortify the mind without troubling the imagination, and, consequently, she remains insensible to the sweet impressions of grace which acts so mildly on the heart as to be unperceived by the senses. To such a woman piety is a mere matter of form, made up of certain practices which, in the guise of religion, flatter and feed her imagination. But the most terrible feature of this condition is, that it always grows worse, keeping the soul in a cloud of darkness, which even the special light attendant on death cannot dispel.