Let us take comfort when we examine our lives. We may find that our daily exercises have been very irregular; that our meditation has been cut short, or elbowed out; our spiritual reading has often been postponed till late at night, or performed in perfunctory or distracted manner, or not infrequently omitted; our Office has been said at odd times whenever we could fit it in; perhaps we have not always been regular even at our daily mass. The cause of much of this has no doubt been culpable; we might have been less irregular than we have been. But if we can truly say that it was in great measure due to the unequal pressure of our work, and that the primary cause is traceable to the necessary sacrifice of our ministry we can feel confidence in the result; for whatever our shortcomings in detail, we have in the main been practising the highest kind of self-sacrifice, and the kind which is specially characteristic of our vocation as secular priests. This is the advice insisted on in the _Imitation of Christ_: [5] "Evil ought not to be done either for anything in the world, or for the love of any man; but for the profit of one that stands in need, a good work is sometimes freely to be omitted, or rather to be changed for a better. For by doing thus, a good work is not lost, but is changed into a better. Without charity the outward work profiteth nothing; but whatever is done out of charity, be it never so little and contemptible, all becomes fruitful. For God regards more with how much affection and love a person performs a work than how much he does."