Page:The Eternal Priesthood (4th ed).djvu/136

124 some men do nothing as if they did everything. A priest who values his time seldom fails to find enough for everything. A punctual mind can so order the hours of the day as to take out of them, and to use the intervals between successive works and duties. Some books of close and continuous matter need an hour of quiet attention; some of a less precise kind may be read in times caught flying; and some may be taken up at any moment. A hard student once advised a friend to have "five-minute books." And many a book could be read through in a year by five minutes a day. All that is needed is the habit of attention, and a firm will not to leave what we read till we understand it, be it only a page, or no more than a sentence. Perhaps some one will say that this is taxing a priest's time too severely. But if we will ask ourselves how much time in the day is given to books that are not necessary, to newspapers, to prolonged conversation, to visits which are not either pastoral or beneficial, to lingering, and doubting what to read and what to do—if we were to cast up all this, the most fervent would find that much time has been stolen from him, much has been wasted, not a little misapplied.

3. A third measure of the value of our time is what we might do in it, if spent in the confessional.