"If," he says, "the world despises us, let us rejoice, for it is right--we see for ourselves that we are very contemptible. If it esteems us, let us despise its esteem and its judgment, for it is blind. Trouble yourself very little about what the world thinks; do not ask or even care to know. Despise equally its appreciation and its contempt, and let it say what it will, good or evil. I do not approve of doing what is not right, that people may have a bad opinion of us. Transgressing is always transgressing, and we are thereby making our neighbour transgress likewise. On the contrary, I desire that, keeping our eyes always fixed upon our Lord, we do what we have to do without regarding what the world thinks of us, or its behaviour towards us. We need not endeavour to give others a good opinion of ourselves, yet neither have we to try to give a bad one, and especially must we be careful not to do wrong with this intent. "But we can never stand quite well with the world; it is far too exacting. If out of compliance we yield to it, and play and dance with it, it will be scandalized; and if we do not, it will accuse us of hypocrisy and gloom; if we are well-dressed it will impute to us some bad motive; and if we are ill-dressed it will call us mean; it will style our gaiety dissoluteness and our mortification gloom. It will exaggerate our failings and publish our faults; and if it cannot find fault with our actions it will attack our motives. Whatever we do the world will find fault. If we spend a long time at confession it will ask what we can have to say; if we take but a short time, it will say that we do not tell everything. If one little cross word escape us it will pronounce our temper unbearable; it will denounce our prudence as avarice, our gentleness as folly. Spiders invariably spoil the bees' labour. Therefore, do not mind what opinion the world has of you, good or bad; do not distress yourself about it, whichever it be. To say that we are not what the world thinks, when it speaks well of us, is wise, for the world, like a quack doctor, always exaggerates." You question me, regarding the contempt which we should feel for the world and the world's opinion of us; in other words you want to know exactly what St. Paul means when he says that, being crucified to the world and the world to us, we should glory only in the Cross of our Saviour Jesus Christ.[2] This seems to you a paradox; light evolved from darkness, and glory from shame. Let me remind you that the Christian religion is full of such paradoxes, and that we belong to an all-powerful God, who has given life to us by His death; who has healed us by His wounds, and who makes us rich by His poverty. I cannot, however, explain the difficulty to you better than by quoting the words of our Blessed Father in one of his letters. He says: "In this alone lies our glory, that our divine Saviour died for us, the Master for His slaves, the just for the unjust."