Reconditorium ac reclusorium opulentiae sapientiaeque numinis mundi magni, cui deditur in titulum chymica vannus, obtenta quidem & erecta auspice mortale coepto ...

3. This says your dearest One: "I am your fate, your salvation, and your peace; keep yourself with me, and you will find peace. Cut off the sirenian desire, desert this bitter, this bile-filled, this miserable world, and you will find rest. Send away the things that perish, seek the things that remain. For what are all transitory things if not seductive? Follow me, because I am the way, the truth, and the life. Without the way, one does not go; without the truth, one does not know; without the life, one does not pass through. I am the way that you ought to follow, the truth to which you ought to yield, the life that you ought to desire. I am the way of salvation, the spheral truth, the intemporal life. I am the straightest way, the supreme truth, the true life, the blessed life, the uncreated life, which if you sigh to inherit, despise the present life. If you wish to dwell in heaven, be a pilgrim on earth. If you desire to triumph with me, sustain my cross; for only those who carry the cross find the way of blessedness and true light."

4. O sweetest, O most gentle protomartyr Jesus! Since Your way is so narrow and also despised by the world, grant me, I beseech You, to emulate You with all the reproach of the world. Nor is the servant greater than his master, nor the disciple above his teacher. Let Your servant be exercised continually in Your life, because there is my salvation and my holiness. Since You, Lord my God, have written me in Your hands, You are my only good; You stand in my heart, You are in my desire, and therefore it is necessary to run after You, to weep, and to beseech. But who am I, that I dare to speak to You so confidently? I am the poorest, the most lost, that ignominious little man of Yours, and a most abject wanderer, a nothingness of mud, undoubtedly much more wicked and contemptible than I know or dare to say.

5. I am, O most high and feared Father, that unformed, faithless, and prodigal grandson, who, snatched away by the furious North Wind of adolescence and impatient of the yoke, behaved toward You insolently for the love of liberty. Following the violent impulse of passions, deserting Your house, I withdrew into distant and foreign regions, in which, living softly and acting dissolutely, I squandered and befouled all my faculties and substance.