every way known to Thee.

Have pity on me and draw me out of the mire [Ps. lxviii. 15], that
I stick not fast therein, that I may not be utterly cast down
forever.

This it is which often drives me back and confounds me in Thy
sight, to find that I am so subject to fall and have so little
strength to resist my passions.

And although I do not altogether consent, yet their assaults are
troublesome and grievous to me, and it is exceedingly irksome to
live thus always in a conflict.

Hence my infirmity is made known to me, because wicked thoughts do
always much more easily rush in upon me than they can be cast out
again.

Oh, that Thou, the most mighty God of Israel, the zealous lover of
faithful souls, wouldst behold the labour and sorrow of Thy
servant, and stand by me in all my undertakings.

Strengthen me with heavenly fortitude, lest the old man, the
miserable flesh, not fully subject to the spirit, prevail and get
the upper hand, against which we must fight as long as we breathe
in this most wretched life.

Alas! what kind of life is this, where afflictions and miseries are
never wanting; where all things are full of snares and enemies.

There is no pessimism here, for Thomas [`a] Kempis gives the remedies, the
only remedies offered to the world since light was created before the
sun. He offers no maudlin consolation; to him the sins of the intellect
are worse than the sins of the flesh. He believed in hell, which he
never defined, as devoutly as Dante, who did describe it. They both knew
their hearts and the world; and the world has never invented any remedy
so effective as that which [`A] Kempis offers.

It is the divine remedy of love; but love cannot exist without the fear
of hurting or offending the Beloved.

The best book yet written on the causes that made for the World War and
on their remedy is "The Rebuilding of Europe," by David Jayne Hill.
There we find this quotation from Villari illuminated:

but it would be more exact to say that Machiavelli's work written
in 1513 and published in 1532 was the perfect expression of an
emancipation from moral restraints far advanced. The
Christ-idealism of the Middle Ages had already largely disappeared.
The old grounds of obligation had been swept away. Men looked for
their safety to the nation-state rather than to t