I see many persons of your condition suffer themselves to be led, for want of knowing the true state of this condition.
ON THE CONVERSION OF THE SINNER.[1]
The first thing with which God inspires the soul that he deigns to touch truly is a knowledge and most extraordinary insight by which the soul considers things and herself in a manner wholly new.
This new light gives her fear, and brings her a trouble that penetrates the repose which she found in the things that made her delights. She can no longer relish with tranquillity the things that charmed her. A continual scruple opposes her in this enjoyment, and this internal sight causes her to find no longer this accustomed sweetness among the things to which she abandoned herself with a full effusion of heart.
| But she finds still more bitterness in the exercises of piety than in the vanities of the world. On one side, the vanity of the visible objects interests her more than the hope of the invisible, and on the other the solidity of the invisible interests her more than the vanity of the visible. And thus the presence of the one and the solidity of the other dispute her affection, and the vanity of the one and the absence of the other excite her aversion; so that a disorder and confusion spring up in her, that | |
She considers perishable things as perishable and even already perished; and in the certain prospect of the annihilation of every thing that she loves, she is terrified by this consideration, in seeing that each moment snatches from her the enjoyment of her good, and that what is most dear to her glides away at every moment, and that finally a certain day will come in which she will find herself stripped of all the things in which she had placed her hope. So that she comprehends perfectly that her heart being attached only to vain and fragile things, her soul must be left alone and forsaken on quitting this life, since she has not taken
- ↑ By some scholars this fragment is attributed to Mlle. Pascal.
