Читать книгу A Golden Treatise of Mental Prayer - St. Peter de Alcántara - Страница 28

THE LIFE OF

themselves to prayer. He observed the first rule of St. Francis with all rigor, and other things which I have related before." Thus she, and so much shall suffice to speak of, but part of his rigorous penance, it was his fervent zeal, and love of God, not strength of body, which made this crabbed way of penance easy to his heroic spirit; whose example may (though not in so great a measure as he did,) justly move us to shake off that old and self-love excuse of ours, in saying, our bodies are weak, when alas ! our wills are frozen, and so nice, that we are afraid to expose our body but to a poor trial. The heathen Seneca will check our indevotion, who saith:* " Not because certain things are hard, therefore we dare not do them, but because we dare not do them, therefore they are hard.”

* Non quia difficilia quEedam sunt, ideo non aude- mus, sed quia non audemus, ideo difficilia.