"If you were able all the time to look upon temptation as an evil it cannot have pleased you." "Still, is it wrong to find pleasure in thinking of what is sinful?" "If this pleasure is felt before we reflect that the thing is evil it is of no consequence, since voluntary malice and consent are needed to make this pleasure a sin." "How shall we know whether or not we have yielded this consent?" "Assuredly, it is difficult to define the nature of voluntary consent. This difficulty gave rise to the saying of the Psalmist, _Who can understand sins?_[1] "This, too, is why he prays to be delivered from his secret faults, that is to say, from sins which he cannot easily discern." I will, however, on this subject give you another excellent lesson which I learned from our Blessed Father. "When you are doubtful," he said to me, "whether or not you have consented to evil, always take the doubt for a negative, and for this reason. A true and full consent of the will is necessary to form a real grave sin, there being no sin in what is not voluntary. Now full consent is so clear that there can never be left in the mind a shadow of doubt about its having taken place." This plain teaching surely cuts the gordian knot of our perplexities. [Footnote 1: Psalm xviii. 13.] THOUGHTS ON THE INCARNATION. There are two opinions held by theologians on the subject of the Incarnation. Some hold that had Adam never sinned the Son of God would not have become incarnate, others that the Incarnation would have taken place even had our first parents remained in the state of innocence and original justice in which they were created. For, as they urge, the Word was made flesh, not to merely be a redeemer and restorer of the human race, but that through Him God might be glorified. Our Blessed Father held this second opinion, which he advanced, not only in familiar conversation and in the pulpit, but also in his writings. In his Theotimus he expresses himself thus: "God knew from all eternity that He could create an innumerable multitude of beings with divers perfections and qualities, to whom He might communicate Himself. And considering that amongst all the different communications which were possible, none was so excellent as that of uniting Himself to some created nature, in such sort that the creature might be engrafted and implanted in the Divinity, and become one single person with it: His infinite goodness, which of itself and by itself tends towards communication, resolved and determined to communicate Himself in this manner. So that, as eternally there is an essential communication in God, by which the Father communicates all His infinite and indivisible divinity to the Son in producing Him, and the Father and the Son together producing the Holy Ghost, communicate to Him also their own singular divinity; so this sovereign sweetness was so perfectly communicated externally to a creature that the created nature and the divinity retaining