ll. The dearest wish of love is to excite the will, and the moral
force of the person loved, to its highest degree, to heroism!

The ideal of every mother, and it is the true one in education, is to
make a hero, a man powerful in actions and fruitful in works, who may
be endowed with will, power, and a creative genius. Let us compare
with this ideal that of ecclesiastical education and direction.

The latter wishes to make a saint, and _not_ a hero; it believes these
two words to be diametrically opposite. It is mistaken also in its
idea of sanctity, in making it consist not in being in harmony with
God, but in absorption in God.

All this priestly theology, as soon as we provoke it a little, and do
not allow it to remain in inconsistency, falls headlong down the
irresistible declivity, right into this abyss. There it ended, as it
was obliged to end, in the seventeenth century. The great directors of
that time, who, by being the last, had the advantage of analysing the
thing, show us perfectly well the bottom of it, which is annihilation,
the art of annihilating activity, the will, and personality.
"Annihilate? Yes, but in God." But does God wish it? His active and
creating spirit must wish us to resemble Him, to act and to create.
You have a wrong idea of God the Father.

This false theory is convicted in practice. By following it closely we
have seen that it arrives at quite an opposite goal. It promises to
absorb man in God; and it consoles him for this absorption, by
promising him that he shall participate in the infinite existence which
he is entering. But, in reality, it does nothing more than absorb man
in man, in infinite littleness. The person directed being annihilated
in the director, of two persons there remains but one; the other, as a
person, has perished; and become a thing.

Devout direction, noticed in our first part among the most loyal
directors, and among very pious women, gives me two results, which I
state thus:--

1st. A saint who discourses for a long time with a female saint on the
love of God, infallibly converts her to love.

2nd. If this love remain pure, it is a chance; it is because the man
is a saint; for the person directed, losing gradually all her own will,
must, in course of time, be at his mercy. We must suppose, also, that
he who may do everything will take no advantage of it, and that this
miracle of abstinence will be renewed every day. The priest has always