examination of the heart 504 internal, that is, domestic, or external: that is, among lay people or people of a different status. Perhaps, you did not perform your duties to everyone’s satisfaction in accordance with the grace and diligence granted to you; or perhaps you did not deter with all your strength and skillfulness the common harms threatening you. Maybe, you did not adorn, advance, or help the Order and the house where you live, but most of all the Church of the Lord, in accordance with the quantity and quality of talents received from God or from nature, when you justly were able and obliged to do so; or if you hindered, or did not help others, in advancing these things, etc. Considering the above-said and many other transgressions against charity, which the Divine Spirit will put as a reproach to your mind, mourn fully the defects discovered in you and resolve [f.166r] to atone for them and to renew the practices of holy charity. In the colloquy, rejoice in the Lord with the greatest love according to the dictate of the intellect, and in an impetus of love, give free rein to the affections of your heart, eliciting from both an act of love. MEDITATION X ON THE SAME VIRTUE 1. Consider those words of St. Paul: “If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but have not love, I am nothing” (1 Cor 13:1-2). By these words you are taught that a man without charity, a religious without love, is a shadow without the sun, the body without a soul: indeed, he is nothing. What the soul is to the body, this charity is to the Church, religious institutes, and religious houses. Rightly indeed, a certain man said in recommendation of this virtue: “Take the sun away from the world, and
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