Page:Spiritualcombat.djvu/117

102 illness all the while with a patient will. Our cunning adversary, knowing that the sick man may thus attain to the habit of patience, suggests at once to him how much good he might have done under different circumstances, and persuades him that in health he would have served God, and have benefited himself and others, to a greater extent. Having excited these thoughts within him, he goes on increasing them by degrees, till at last he makes him restless at not being able to carry these desires into good effect.

The keener and stronger such desires become the more this restlessness increases. Then, imperceptibly and artfully, the Enemy leads him on to impatience under his sickness, not on account of the sickness itself, but because of the hindrance the sickness becomes to those good works which the sick man so anxiously desires to perform for some greater good.

Having led him on thus far, with the same subtlety he withdraws from his mind the end he had in view, of serving God and doing good works, leaving only the bare desire to be cured of his sickness; and then, when this desire is not granted him, he is vexed, and becomes actually impatient about it. Thus, insensibly he falls from the virtue of which he was acquiring the habit, into the opposite vice.

This is the way to guard against and resist this