2. Do not trust your present feelings too much. There is nothing so rooted in the heart but it may by neglect in process of time lose its force and vigour. If you neglect the old wound it grows callous, and in proportion as it loses feeling it becomes incurable. In fact, severe unceasing pain cannot last long ; if it is not got rid of some other way, it must of necessity be conquered by itself. Beyond a doubt it will either be relieved by some remedy, or it will end in stupefaction. Custom turns everything upside down. Give it time, and what can resist its hardening effect ? What does not yield to use ? How many find that the bitterness they had formerly dreaded has unfortunately through use alone turned to sweetness ? Hear how the just man laments over this : ‘ What things my soul refused to touch are now through want become my food.’1 At first something will seem to you unbearable ; as time goes on, and you get used to it, you will judge it of no such great importance ; a little later you will think it even unimportant ; a little later you will not think it even that ; a little later it will delight you. Thus little by little our hearts are hardened, and then we loathe goodness. Just so, severe unceasing pain must, as I have said, have a speedy ending ; it will either be cured, or insensibility will ensue.
3. This is precisely why I have always feared, and still fear, that if you delay to apply the remedy, you will not endure the pain, and that you may thus incur the risk of being irrevocably and hopelessly overwhelmed. I am afraid, I say, lest, surrounded by occupations so numerous that you distrust your power of getting through them, you may harden your forehead, and thus gradually in a measure strip yourself of the feeling of a just and profitable sorrow. It would be far more prudent for you to even leave them for a time, than suffer yourself to be carried away by them, and certainly by degrees led whither you would not. Do you ask whither ? I reply, to a hard heart. Do not further ask what that means ; if you have not greatly feared it, it is yours already. That heart alone is hard which does not shudder at itself for not feeling its hardness. Why ask me ? Ask Pharaoh. No one ever got his hard heart cured unless God haply took pity on him, and, according to the prophet, removed his heart of stone and gave him a heart of flesh.2 What then is a hard heart? It is a heart which is not torn by remorse, nor softened by affection, nor moved by entreaties; which does not yield to threats, but is hardened by scourges. It is ungrateful for kindnesses, faithless in counsel, cruel in judgement, shameless in disgrace, without sense of fear in the midst of danger, inhuman in things human, heedless in things divine; it forgets the past, neglects the present, does not look on to the future. It is a heart emptied of all the past except the wrongs it has suffered, which lets slip all the present, which has no forecast of the future, no preparation to meet it, unless perchance it be with a view to gratifying its malice. And, that I may briefly sum up the mischief of this dreadful plague, it is a heart which neither fears God nor respects man. See whither these accursed occupations can drag you at their heels, if, as you have begun, you continue to give yourself wholly to them, and leave nothing of yourself for yourself. You are wasting time; and, if I may present myself to you in the character of another Jethro, you,3 like Moses, are spending yourself in this foolish labour over these things which are nothing else but torture of spirit, the enfeebling of the mind, the voiding of grace. For the fruit of these things, what is it but spiders' webs?