or your skill; all the unclean thoughts, desires, and longings that you kept in your mind about unmarried or married persons, about relatives or persons consecrated to God, in some of which you have secretly taken pleasure, while in others you have wished to commit the sinful act; all the complacency you have had in former sins, or in future lustful gratifications that you imagined in occasions and temptations that were likely to befall you; all the desires you had that others should have an unlawful passion for you; all the impure emotions you experienced in wilfully looking at another person; in assisting at an immodest play; in looking at an unchaste picture, etc.: all these things you will have to answer for in order, and confess when, how often, and how long you were guilty of them.
And said. “Give an account:” answer for all the words that you have heard and said during your life; how many imprecations and curses; how many words of abuse and invective, of sarcasm and contention you have spoken against others; how often you have injured Christian charity and your neighbor’s reputation by talking, fault-finding, tale-bearing, and detraction; how often you have disturbed the peace between friend and relations, brothers and sisters, husband and wife, by carrying stories backward and forward; how often you have indulged in or wilfully listened to impure conversation, or sullied your own purity and that of others by indecent allusions, double-meaning expressions and similes, and unchaste songs and writings; how often you have taught others to sin, and instructed the innocent in things they should never have learned; how often you have taken false and unnecessary oaths, or made false promises; how often you have dishonored the Almighty God and His saints by unbecoming words or blasphemy; how often you have told injurious, deliberate, or jocose lies; how often you have boasted of yourself or of your sins in the company of others; nay, how often you have spoken idly and to no purpose. Alas! exclaims St. Bernard, considering this point; alas! what account shall we be able to give for our idle words,[1] and what shall we be able to say about the sinful words we have uttered? Yet Our Lord tells us in the Gospel of St. Matthew: “But I say unto you, that every idle word that men shall speak they shall render an account for it in the day of judgment. For by thy words thou shalt
- ↑ Heu nobis! quænam ratio reddi poterit de otio!
