"Must we then," I asked, "give up all spiritual guides?" "By no means," he answered, "for besides the fact that we are bound to obey the law of God coming to us through our Superiors, both spiritual and temporal, we must also defer most humbly to our Confessors, to whom we lay bare the secrets of our conscience. Then, when we find difficulties in the books which we have chosen for our guidance, difficulties which, as we read, we cannot settle to our satisfaction, we must consult those who are well versed in mystic language, or rather, I should say, in spiritual matters, and listen humbly to their opinion. We must not, however, always consult the same man; for, besides the fact that Holy Scripture warns us that _there is safety where there is much counsel_,[4] we must remember that if we always consulted the same living oracle, he would in time become superior to the dead one; that he would make himself a supplanter, a second Jacob, pushing aside the book which we had chosen for our guide, and assuming dominion and mastery over both dead and living, that is, over the book and the reader who had chosen it for his direction. To prevent this encroachment, I had almost said this unfelt and imperceptibly increasing tyranny, it is well when we meet with difficulties to consult several persons, following the advice given by the Holy Ghost through the Apostle St. Paul not to make ourselves the slaves of men, having been delivered and redeemed at so great a price, even that of the Precious Blood of Jesus Christ."[5] In answer to my remark that I very much preferred as a book _The Imitation of Christ_ to the _Spiritual Combat_, he said that they were both the works of writers truly animated by the Spirit of God, that they were indeed different in many respects, but that it might be said of each of them as it is of the Saints: _There was not found the like to him._[6] He added that in such matters comparisons were always more or less odious; that beauty, however it might vary, was always beauty; that the book of _the Imitation_ had in some respects great advantages over _the Combat_, but that the latter had also some advantages over _the Imitation_. Among these he mentioned with special commendation its arrangement and that it goes deeper into things and more thoroughly to the root of the matter. He concluded by saying that we should do well to read the one and not neglect the other, for that both books were so short that to do this would not put us to much expenditure of time or trouble. He valued _the Imitation_, he said, greatly for its brevity and conciseness as an aid to prayer and contemplation, but _the Combat_ as a help in active and practical life. [Footnote 1: Book 1. c. 10.] [Footnote 2: This hyperbole of St. Francis is sometimes pushed to excess, It is a question, too, if M. Camus always understood him rightly. [ED.]] [Footnote 3: Job xiv. 2.] [Footnote 4: Prov. xi. 14.] [Footnote 5: 1 Cor. vii. 23.] [Footnote 6: Eccle. xliv. 20.]