[Footnote 1: S. Thomas 2a, 2ae, Quaest, lxxxi., art. 2.] [Footnote 2: 2a, 2ae, Quaest, lxxxii. to lxxxviii.] [Footnote 3: _The Devout Life_, Part i., chap. 1.] [Footnote 4: Book x., chap. 3.] UPON PERFECT CONTENTMENT IN THE PRIVATION OF ALL CONTENT. It is true that the devout life, which is nothing but an intense and fervent love of God, is an angelic life and full of contentment and of extraordinary consolation. It is, however, also true that those who submit themselves to the discipline of God, even while experiencing the sweetness of this divine love, must prepare their soul for temptation. The path which leads to the Land of Promise is beset with difficulties--dryness, sadness, desolation, and faint-hearted fears--and would end in bewildering discouragement, did not Faith and Hope, like Joshua and Caleb, show us the fair fruits of this much to be desired country, and thus animate us to perseverance. But He who brings light out of darkness, and roses out of thorns, who helps us in all our tribulations, and performs wonders in heaven and earth, makes the happy souls whom He leads through His will to His glory to find perfect content in the loss of all content, both corporal and spiritual when once they recognize that it is the will of God that they should go to Him by the way of darkness, perplexity, crosses, and anguish. In saying this I am putting into my own words the thoughts of our Blessed Father as expressed in the eleventh chapter of the sixth book of his _Treatise on the Love of God_. UPON THE WILL OF GOD. Meditating this morning on that passage of Holy Scripture which tells us that the life of man is in the good will of God,[1] I reflected that to live according to the will of the flesh, that is, according to the human will, is not really life, since the prudence of the flesh is death; but that to live according to the will of God is the true life of the soul, since the grace attached to that divine will imparts a life to our soul far higher than the life our soul imparts to our body. The divine will is our sanctification, and this sanctification is the gate of eternal life; of that true life in comparison with which the life which we lead on earth is more truly a death. To live in God, in whom is true life, is to live according to His will. Our life, then, is to do His will. This made St. Paul say that he lived, yet not he himself, but that Jesus Christ lived in him,[2] because he had only one will and one mind with Jesus Christ, I was rejoiced to find that unconsciously my thoughts on this subject had followed closely in the track of our Blessed Father's when he meditated on the same passage. This I discovered on reading these words in one of his letters: