Ver. 6.—Behold, he is in thy hand, only preserve his life. 57. Sometimes God abandons us in order to guard us. Temptation occurs with the soul safe, where consent is withheld. Yet the wound of delight must be cured by penance.—For thus He abandons us that He may guard us; thus He guards us, that nevertheless, through the permitted crisis of temptation, He may show us the state of our own infirmity. He straightway went forth from the face of the Lord, and, striking, wounded him from the sole of the foot to the crown of the head; because indeed, when he receives licence, beginning from the least things and advancing even to the greater, he as it were pierces the whole body of the mind by lacerating it with the temptations he brings on.
But yet by striking he does not reach the soul, because the intention of the secret purpose, more inward than all thoughts, resists amid the very wounds of the delights which it receives; so that although delight bites the mind, yet it does not bend the deliberation of holy uprightness to the softness of consent. Nevertheless we ought, through the harshness of penance, to wipe away those very wounds of the delights, and by the censure of a rigid strictness to cleanse whatever flows loosely into the thought. Whence it is rightly added at once: