POINT II.
1. Secondly, I will consider what I am with regard to the soul, pondering that I was created of nothing, and that of myself I am " nothing [1] that I merit nothing, and that presently I shall be turned into nothing if God do not continually preserve me; neither should I be able to do anything if God did not continually aid me. [2] Besides this, " I was conceived in iniquities," [3] and with an inclination to sin through the disorder of my appetites and passions; I live subject to infinite miseries of ignorance and error, environed with innumerable temptations within me and without me, by visible and invisible enemies that on all sides encompass me; and through the imbecility of my free-will I have consented and do consent to them, committing many sins, by which I come to be less than nothing; for it is a less evil not to be than to sin, and " it were better for " me "not to have been" [4] than to be damned.
2. And if this be that which I am, much worse is that which I may he, through my great mutability and weakness; for in the thread I have the clue of the whole ball, and by the interior motions that I feel to innumerable sins of infidelity, blasphemy, anger and carnality, I gather and conclude that I am subject to all these sins, and should fall into them if God should take from me His holy hand; and by what all the sinners of the world do and have done, I may gather what I should have done if I had been left at my own liberty. For (as St Augustine says) " there is no sin that one man does but another man may do the same." [5] And therefore I must imagine myself as a fountain of all the sins that are in the world, and as a dead and stinking
