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304 you consented to it; whether it was voluntary or not, or was at once put away. And, from taking the wrong road, the more you think of it, the less you are able to make up your mind about it, and the more your weariness and perplexity increase, and your anxiety to confess it; and so you go to confession with a tedious fear, and, after having lost much time in making your confession, your spirit is even more uneasy than it was before it, for fear that you have not told all; thus your life is one spent in bitterness and anxiety, with little fruit, and with the loss in a great measure of its reward.

And all this comes from not knowing your own natural weakness, and the way the soul should treat with God. For after having fallen into all the faults we have enumerated, or into any others, we may more easily treat with God by a humble and loving conversion, than by the spirit of grief and discontent at the fault itself, in the case of the examination into venial and ordinary sins, to which alone I now allude. For it is only into such sins as these a soul is wont to fall, which lives in the manner I am now supposing; and I am speaking only of those persons who lead a spiritual life, and are striving to advance in it, and are free from mortal sin. For those who live carelessly, and in mortal sin, and are always more or less offending God, have