the servants of Jesus Christ, write to you in His Precious Blood, with the
desire to see you established in true patience, since I consider that
without patience we cannot please God. For just as impatience gives much
pleasure to the devil and to one's own lower nature, and revels in nothing
but anger when it misses what the lower nature wants, so it is very
displeasing to God. It is because anger and impatience are the very pith
and sap of pride that they please the devil so much. Impatience loses the
fruit of its labour, deprives the soul of God; it begins by knowing a
foretaste of hell, and later it brings men to eternal damnation: for in
hell the evil perverted will burns with anger, hate and impatience. It
burns and does not consume, but is evermore renewed--that is, it never
grows less, and therefore I say, it does not consume. It has indeed
parched and consumed grace in the souls of the lost, but as I said it has
not consumed their being, and so their punishment lasts eternally. The
saints say that the damned ask for death and cannot have it, because the
soul never dies. It dies to be sure to grace, by mortal sin; but it does
not die to existence. There is no sin nor wrong that gives a man such a
foretaste of hell in this life as anger and impatience. It is hated by
God, it holds its neighbour in aversion, and has neither knowledge nor
desire to bear and forbear with its faults. And whatever is said or done
to it, it at once empoisons, and its impulses blow about like a leaf in
the wind. It becomes unendurable to itself, for perverted will is always
gnawing at it, and it craves what it cannot have; it is discordant with
the will of God and with the rational part of its own soul. And all this
comes from the tree of Pride, from which oozes out the sap of anger and
impatience. The man becomes an incarnate demon, and it is much worse to
fight with these visible demons than with the invisible. Surely, then,
every reasonable being ought to flee this sin.

But note, that there are two sources of impatience. There is a common kind