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OUR third conflict is against covetousness which we can describe as the
love of money; a foreign warfare, and one outside of our nature, and in the
case of a monk originating only from the state of a corrupt and sluggish
mind, and often from the beginning of his renunciation being
unsatisfactory, and his love towards God being lukewarm at its foundation.
For the rest of the incitements to sin planted in human nature seem to have
their commencement as it were congenital with us, and somehow being deeply
rooted in our flesh, and almost coeval with our birth, anticipate our
powers of discerning good and evil, and although in very early days they
attack a man, yet they are overcome with a long struggle.
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