teaching little children, or consoling the afflicted, or in giving help to the dying? and how many in conversation over dinner-tables or in drawing-rooms? How many hours have I wasted in wandering to and fro from house to house, where I never heard and never uttered the name of God? and how much time have I spent in preaching His Word, the chief end of my priesthood? How many hours have I given to some particular friendship, and how many to prayer, speaking with God? Cast up these hours, turn them into days and years, and what a reckoning will stand before us. But it is already cast up in the book of God's remembrance. If the worldly priest had given the energy and diligence which he wasted on the world to the work of his own perfection, he might have been a Saint.[1]
5. Lastly—for we must end—comes the death of a fervent priest. The world never knew him, or passed him over as a dim light outshone by the priests who court it. But in the sight of God what a contrast. Ever since his ordination, or earlier, ever since his second conversion to God, he has examined his conscience day by day, and made up his
- ↑ "Ecce mundus sacerdotibus plenus est, sed tamen in messe Dei rarus valde invenitur operator: quia officium quidam sacerdotale suscipimus, sed opus officii non implemus."—S. Greg. Hom. xvii. in Evangelia.
