The Interior Life Simplified And Reduced To Its Fundamental Principle PDF Download

Excerpt from The Interior Life: Simplified and Reduced to Its Fundamental Principle The pages of this invaluable book are not from my pen; and yet they are mine so far as a religious may venture to say so. Their writer gave them me in manuscript with full liberty to do what I liked with them. Contrary to his expectation, but not without his authority, I decided to have them published as soon as I had pondered them. They had procured me inward enjoyment, and (thank God), I venture to hope, true spiritual profit. I should have blamed myself had I kept them to myself, and I remembered the words of the Wise Man: "I have learned without guile and communicate wisdom without envy; and her riches I hide not." What, then, did this manuscript contain? Substantially, nothing new; for, starting from the well-known Fundamental Principle of St. Ignatius, admirably commented on, it reaches conclusions that the simplest of logic suffices to deduce. But it is just the simplicity and unanswerable logic of the argument, and the astonishing richness of the Scriptural texts wherewith it is corroborated, which have delighted me. In these latter days, indeed, there is a great dearth of spiritual treatises primarily arresting the intelligence, persuading it by means of reason and faith, and compelling it to set the will towards duty and perfection. How different is the solidity of such a foundation from that of sentimentalism, so much exploited in these days in the service, or rather, to the prejudice, of piety! Is feeling, then, excluded from these pages ? One would think so, on opening them and seeing the author's efforts to reduce it to a secondary role. Nevertheless, soon, in the light of his clear and irrefutable teaching, arises a warmth that wins the heart. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.