friend how he fell into such a state of poverty; he took from his pocket a small volume of the Gospels, and said: "Behold, this is what has stripped me of all." The Holy Spirit says: If a man shall give all the substance of his house for love, he shall despise it as nothing.[1] And when a soul fixes her whole love in God, she despises all, wealth, pleasures, dignities, territories, kingdoms, and all her longing is after God alone; she says, again and again: "My God, I wish for Thee only, and nothing more." St. Francis de Sales writes:[2] "The pure love of God consumes everything which is not God, to convert all into itself; for whatever we do for the love of God is love."
The Sacred Spouse said: He brought me into the cellar of wine, he set in order charity in me.[3] This cellar of wine, writes St. Teresa, is divine love, which, on taking possession of a soul, so perfectly inebriates it as to make it forgetful of everything created. A person intoxicated is, as it were, dead in his senses; he does not see, nor hear, nor speak; and so it happens to the soul inebriated with divine love. She has no longer any sense of the things of the world; she wishes to think only of God, to speak only of God; she recognizes no other motive in all her actions but to love and to please God. In the sacred Canticles the Lord forbids them to awake his beloved, who sleeps: Stir not up, nor make the beloved to awake, till she please.[4] This blessed sleep, enjoyed by souls espoused to Jesus Christ, says St. Basil, is nothing else than "the utter oblivion of all things,"[5] a virtuous and voluntary forgetfulness of every created thing, in order to be occu-
- ↑ "Si dederit homo omnem substantiam domus suæ pro dilectione, quasi nihil despiciet eam."—Cant. viii. 7.
- ↑ Lettres 531, 203.
- ↑ "Introduxit me in cellam vinariam, ordinavit in me charitatem."—Cant. ii. 4.
- ↑ "Ne suscitetis, neque evigilare faciatis dilectam."—Cant. ii. 7.
- ↑ "Summa rerum omnium oblivio."—Reg. fus. disp. int. 6.
