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As your grand and splendid exposition of a doctrine new to us has
opened out to us a more difficult road to the most glorious renunciation,
and has removed the scales from our eyes, and shown to us its summit raised
in the heavens, so are we proportionately cast down with a greater weight
of despair. Since, when we measure its vastness against our puny strength,
and compare the excessively humble character of our ignorance with the
boundless height of virtue shown to us, we feel that we are so small that
we not only cannot attain to it, but that we are sure to fall short in what
we have. For as we are weighed down by the burden of excessive despair, we
fall away somehow from the low-eat depths to still lower ones. Accordingly
there is one and only one support which can provide a cure for our wounds;
viz., for us to learn something of the end of penitence and especially on
the marks of satisfaction, that we may feel sure of the forgiveness of past
sins, and so be spurred on to scale the heights of the perfection described
above.
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