examination of the heart 140 between you and Christ! The twelfth year in your Savior’s life produced examples of astounding piety, while in yours it gave beginning to all sorts of wickedness. And how are you spending your years in the house of God now? In negligence, listlessness, and insolence! Watch out lest it may seem that you imitate Jesus by your religious garments, yet are a villain by conduct, and show yourself worse than a man of the world. The religious state does not save anybody, but the religious life does. Perhaps you have heard about that condemned soldier who, having entered a certain religious institute, traded his military uniform for religious garb, but did not change his conduct. Therefore, after his death he appeared from hell, bringing back the religious garb on a horse’s tail.37 May the heavenly host forbid that you [f.13v] be a religious in name only and not in fact. If you do not abandon your evil worldly habits, and if you do not respond to your vocation, then you shall have a similar and most unhappy end. 2. “they sought [H]im among their kinsfolk and acquaintances” (Lk 2:44). The most chaste Joseph with his spouse, the Blessed Virgin, could not find the Child Jesus among their friends, family members, and relatives. Neither shall you find Him in idle chats, in curious reading, in the world, on the streets, in thoughts foreign to your manner of life, or in the conversation of worldly people. Listen to the words of St. Augustine, the bishop of Hippo and Doctor of the Church, who for a long time sought the Lord exactly in such places: “I went all round,” he says, “the villages and city streets of this world, seeking You,” (God) “but not finding: because I was erroneously seeking outside the One who was inside. ... You were with me, yet I was not with You: You were kept away fromme by these things that could not exist other than by You.”38 37 A source could not be found in which this event is narrated. The identity of this religious and the institute he joined are not known. 38 Augustinus, Soliloquia, in: Meditationes, Soliloquia et Manuale, LugduniParisiis 1861, pp. 155-156 (Ch. 31, §§ 1, 4).
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