"Like the stained web that whitens in the sun, Grows pure by being purely shone upon."
As you say, a great deal does depend upon the influences that surround us, especially with weak souls like me. I envy those men who are as gods, in spite of temperament, or clime, or any outward influence; who go on unchecked from one degree of glory to another, to the very heights of sanctity. I am always drifting along, awaiting the impulse of the sacraments, or the helping hand of some stronger friend, too glad if I do not recede. Ah! solitude brings us face to face with ourselves, and reveals to us our _moral littleness_! Nothing is more humbling than this revelation. Nothing makes us more distrustful of ourselves, and more willing to accept the appointed means of perfection. The life our director thinks the safest is a common life, lived in an _uncommon_ manner; that is, while we do the same things as those around us, it is with motives so holy that each action is rendered in a degree supernatural. This is the great secret of the hidden and interior life, which the saints of all ages have loved and of which St. Joseph is the type.
I have been reading _Fioretti; or, the Little Flowers of St. Francis d'Assisi_--a collection of the sayings of the first Franciscans, with a rare bloom on them. These mediæval flowers, so long shut up in a foreign tongue, have a delicious fragrance, and while I inhaled their odor I forgot that I belonged to an incredulous age. There is a simplicity truly poetical in this collection, which is admirable. One little remark of Friar Egide struck me: "_La voie la plus directe pour nous sauver, c'est de nous perdre._" This loss, this annihilation of self, on the ruins of which must be built up the great edifice of our perfection, is what I daily sigh after, and what I ask for you. The Père Milley, a Jesuit, speaks much of "_le pays des âmes perdues_"--a country to which all my desires tend. It is a promised land which I see afar off; another Canaan, which I hardly dare hope to enter, though I look wistfully on those who are lost in God--that ocean without limit, where our littleness is swallowed up in immensity, and we almost forget our fears and our frailties; we know not whether we suffer or are consoled; conscious only of the divine atmosphere--conscious only that we love!...