examination of the heart 522 them attentively, especially those appropriate to your vocation and perfection. Note also the failings and vices that are contrary to these virtues. How diligent have you been in avoiding the chattiness that destroys virtues and distracts the spirit? How carefully have you been keeping silence, which is the guardian of these virtues and the recollected spirit; and have you trained yourself in observing it? In what way did you foster kindness, gentleness, and meekness; the greatest ornaments of a religious man? How much effort did you put in attaining patience, this hereditary virtue of Christians and especially of the religious; in gaining fortitude and magnanimity; fighting things that are contrary to perfection? With what force of the spirit have you been overcoming pusillanimity, groundless fear, uncontrolled sadness, impatience, and furious anger? Have you exercised resignation, the most certain source of internal peace and perseverance, or have you omitted to do so? Have you made until now any progress in religious perfection, [f.170v] not according to honor, knowledge, dignified positions and more distinguished offices, but according to poverty, humility, obedience, love of God, self-contempt and other virtues, in which the perfection of a religious consists? Consider whether you have progressed or regressed in the spiritual exercises, for example, in prayer and contemplation, according to the multitude of God’s graces? Because, according to the frequently repeated maxim of the Doctors of spirituality: “Not progressing means regressing; not going forward, means going backward.”265 Who would not understand this, taught by daily experience? 265 Cf. Antonio Royo and Jordan Aumann, The Theology of Christian Perfection, Wipf & Stock Publishers, Eugene, OR, 1962, p. 138: “The famous axiom, so often cited by the Fathers of the Church, ‘He who does not go forward on the road of God falls back,’ [(‘In via Domini, non progredi est regredi,’)] clearly expresses the necessity of constantly progressing in the way of Christian perfection at the risk of falling back and of compromising one’s salvation.”
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