Page:Spiritual Reflections for Every Day in the Year - Vol 2.pdf/158

 to enter for a moment into ourselves. We must note carefully the secret workings of our passions—the subtleness of that self-love which would lead us in any instance to prefer ourselves before others; the allurements of those worldly attachments which render our hearts at any time cold and careless about the things of God: we must thus attend well to what passes in the little world of our own minds; and by the light of divine truth, explore faithfully those inward recesses of affection and thought, which are the secret springs of life, and which give either a good or bad quality to all our outward words and works.

The most effectual way to discover these secret faults is to receive affectionately into the understanding and heart the divine light of truth, and by the help of this light proceed with sincerity and courage to make the discovery. If the divine truth be thus admitted, we shall experience the salutary and blessed effects of the divine presence, and this presence will make manifest to us those secret defilements of the heart, which were before unknown even to ourselves; it will shew us the hidden sources of good and evil—of faithfulness and of fault—of virtue and of vice, in our minds. This is the wisdom which is infinitely more interesting to us than any other, because it is that with which both our temporal and eternal happiness are most closely connected,

Secret faults, although perhaps not so hurtful to mankind in general, because they do not appear, are nevertheless extremely injurious to individual peace of mind. For secret faults are the springs or hidden roots of all outward faults; and these springs of action influence in a great measure our lives and con-