Mirror of the Honest Life and Eight Points of Spiritual Perfection

collected, so that one spirit may be made with Him in whom the highest perfection of the way is known to consist. This, therefore, is the brief formula for your life; let it be handed down to you, in which the sum of all perfection consists, and in which, if you study diligently and faithfully desire to dedicate your affection, you will be blessed and will in a certain way begin eternal happiness in this fragile body. This, my son, is the path of salvation which your Arsenius a fourth-century ascetic saint, taught by an angel, kept and commanded his disciples to keep: Flee, be silent, rest. These, he said to the disciple, are the principles of salvation. He also immediately adds: the fountain and origin of all goods for the spiritual man is to abide continually in his cell.

Fifth: that you are not saddened, nor gladdened, nor anxious for your friends and relatives, but entrust them to God and provide them with spiritual assistance, namely the suffrages of your prayers. But consider yourself crucified to the world and the world to yourself, and extend yourself toward interior things as if you were deprived of all friends.

Sixth: that you become fervent in prayers and holy meditations, and that you do not grow tepid in that will with which you came to religion and in the fervor of your first novitiate. For a sluggish man, if he begins something, acts with a little vigor at the beginning; then he proceeds by diminishing, because it is for many to begin and for few to finish. Yet only perseverance will be crowned, and only it receives the prize. There is no virtue without labor, and one does not arrive at great rewards except through great labors. For the kingdom of heaven is not for the slothful, the remiss, or the delicate, but the violent take it by force, who inflict not upon others but upon their own wills a glorious violence. For those who are soft and fluid in their morals descend to the bottom like rushing water, but those who are constant, firm, and fervent grow every day into the fortress of virtue. To foolish men, nothing pleases for long, for such men desire what they do not have, and loathe what they have. Therefore, be constant, and do not be moved by the examples of the tepid to imitate them. And the vigor of the order is not held by others; do not interfere in this, but see that you walk without offense before your brethren, amending them more by example than by words, so that all things of the order