which wash out its stains. Thus, in the third place, the sinner of our gospel is not contented with having sacrificed her hair and her perfumes to Jesus Christ; she prostrates herself at his feet, she washes them with her tears, she wipes, she kisses them: and, as the third disorder of her sin had been a shameful subjection of her senses, she begins the reparation of these criminal lewdnesses, by the humiliation and disgust of these lowly services.
New instruction: — it is not sufficient to remove from the passions those allurements which incite them; it is likewise necessary that laborious exertions of such virtues as are most opposite to them, insensibly repress, and recall them to duty and order. You were fond of gaming, pleasures, amusements, and every thing which composes a worldly life; it is doing little to cut off from these pleasures that portion which may still conduct to guilt; if you wish that the love of the world be extinguished in your heart, it is necessary that prayer, retirement, silence, and acts of charity, succeed to these dissolute manners; and that, not satisfied with shunning the crimes of the world, you likewise fly from the world itself. By giving yourself up to boundless and shameful passions, you have fortified the empire of the senses and of the flesh; it is necessary that fasting, watching, the yoke of mortification, gradually extinguish these impure fires, weaken these tendencies, become ungovernable through a long indulgence of voluptuousness, and not only remove guilt from you, but operate, as I may say, to dry up its source in your heart. Otherwise, by sparing, you only render yourself more miserable: the old attachments which you shall have broken without having weakened, and, as it were, rooted them from your heart by mortification, will incessantly be renewing their attacks; your passions, become more violent and impetuous by being checked and suspended, without your having weakened and overcome them, will make you undergo agitations and storms, such as you had never experienced even in guilt: you will behold yourself on the point, every moment, of a melancholy shipwreck; you will never taste of peace in this new life. You will find yourself more weak, more exhausted, more animated for pleasure, more easy to be shaken, and more disgusted with the service of God, in this state of imperfect penitence, than you had even been formerly in the midst of dissipation; every thing will become a rock to you; you will be a continual temptation to yourself; you will be astonished to find within you a still greater repugnance to duties; and, as it is hardly possible to stand out long against yourself, you will soon become disgusted with a virtue by which you suffer so much; and, in consequence of your having wished to be only a tranquil and mitigated penitent, you will be an unhappy one, without consolation, without peace, and, consequently, without perseverance. To augment and multiply the sacrifices is to abridge the sufferings in virtue; and whatever we are induced to spare to the passions, becomes rather the punishment and the disgust, than the softening of our penitence.
The last disorder which had accompanied the sin of the woman
