1. Every holy virtue is a divine thing, wholly incorporeal and most pure: which defiled minds do not defile, but it itself cleanses the defiled; by the participation of which the formless are given form, the dead are raised, the infirm are healed, the crooked are corrected, the estranged are reconciled. This none possesses save God, and he to whom God has given it. It dwells in the soul, yet it sanctifies both soul and body; to which none comes unwilling, which none loses except one deceived by his own will. No one can confer it upon himself, though he can take it away; but upon another he is able neither to confer it nor to take it away.
2. And so, when such and so great a virtue has shone upon someone still languishing amid his own pleasures, and has stirred in him a wholesome desire to long after it: at once a strife of two contrary delights arises in his soul; and the will, divided against itself by a wavering delight, leads and leads back the mind in diverse directions, now reproving what it had chosen, now choosing what it had reproved; and thus, as he turns himself this way and that by the variety of his thoughts, that—as it were—charming midpoint between virtue and vice vexes and tears him. Since indeed any man, until he establishes himself with a fixed resolve in what he has chosen—so long as now he does not will what he was willing, now begins to will what he was not willing—is, as it were,
set at the crossroads of an uncertain deliberation, the very diversity of his wills tears him apart. On one side virtue admonishes him of his own salvation and calls him; on the other side, vicious habit holds back and recalls him as he wills to depart from it, and—he being a little turned away from it, yet not fully converted to virtue—flatters him with the reminder of accustomed pleasure, and displays all the allurements which he once enjoyed to his ruin. It also injects the shameful desires by which he is bound, and to one now almost loathing it, it softly whispers some smooth I-know-not-what; and it begs him not to prefer hard things to soft, sad to delightful, doubtful to certain, future to present pleasure; let him consider how penal and difficult it is to lack sweet delights, to renounce
carnal allurements, to be burdened with continual labors of abstinence, to be tormented by the unbroken continuation of fastings and vigils, to seek by certain affliction of the flesh the reward of a doubtful recompense, to take up arms in resisting against the devil, expert in deceiving, to avoid his snares and frauds by the caution of a watchful mind; and finally, how wretched it is, after being overcome by the enormity of so great a harshness and deceived by diabolical fraud, to return to the things repudiated, to enjoy the pleasures one had cast off, and to take delight in all those things which, by incautiously undertaking a laborious resolution, one had despised. 3. By these and such suggestions, vicious habit afflicts the wavering of the holy resolve.
On the other side, the virtue which is called continence confidently rebukes the one who tarries, and invites him to the pure delights and chaste pleasures which all her lovers enjoy; she offers a garment to him who is naked in righteousness; she displays to the enlightened the adornment of her array; she promises to him who distrusts of himself the aid of her protection: she exhorts and provokes him to lay aside the ambiguity of his resolve and take up the spiritual purpose; that he should trust to persevere in the undertaken labor of his purpose, not by his own ability but by the Lord's mercy, and—relying not on his own strength but on the help of the grace of the Almighty—take up victorious arms against diabolical assaults; let him consider how many men and how many women have been able, and are able, to do what he despairs that he can do:
from the source whence those men or those women were able, let him firmly believe that he too is able; with sure hope let him set spiritual things before carnal, heavenly before earthly, and future before present.