careful, and follow our Lord’s counsel: When you shall stand to pray, forgive, if you have aught against any man. Otherwise, if man reserve wrath for man, how shall he seek remedy of God?
6. But if we learn to be gentle minded and placable towards all who injure us, we have to take care that this gentleness does not degenerate into softness and remissness, and that the devil does not thus gradually seduce us into carnal luxury.
When, then, we see that this detestable vice of luxury is dominant far and wide over the human race, so that all flesh has corrupted its way no less at this day than of old, we should have a strong fear of this pestiferous head of the Beast; for, says the Wise Man, It has cast down many wounded, and the strongest have been slain by it. Let us therefore implore God to be our helper, for we cannot be continent except by the gift of God. Therefore, let us pray,
And lead us not into temptation.
That is, permit not us to be led into it, who are frail to resist it, because, if we are left to our own strength, such is our proneness to evil, that we are certain to be led into it, and overcome by it.
7. But though our wicked enemy should find himself foiled in his previous attacks, still he will not desist, but will endeavour to destroy the soul by the poison of envy, the sin most peculiarly his own ( for by the envy of the devil death came into the world), and to make our neighbour’s prosperity become our cross and torment.
Hence it is that we do not look with a good eye upon our neighbour, but grieve at his prosperity, and rejoice at his adversity. From this diabolical and worst of vices, we pray, finally, to be delivered, in saying,
But deliver us from evil.
The evil, that is, of envy, which makes us wholly and entirely evil. For the evil one infects and inflames men with the poison of which he is himself full to the uttermost. For what is worse than for one to turn to his own hurt the good of another, who, by rejoicing in another’s good, might, as it were, make it his own, and thus himself be made by it better, happier, nearer to, and more worthy of, the Supreme Good?
