prayed. If I meditated on any mystery of His life, I represented
it to myself as within me, though the greater part of my time I
spent in reading good books, which was all my comfort; for God
never endowed me with the gift of making reflections with the
understanding, or with that of using the imagination to any good
purpose: my imagination is so sluggish, [12] that even if I would
think of, or picture to myself, as I used to labour to picture,
our Lord's Humanity, I never could do it.

11. And though men may attain more quickly to the state of
contemplation, if they persevere, by this way of inability to
exert the intellect, yet is the process more laborious and
painful; for if the will have nothing to occupy it, and if love
have no present object to rest on, the soul is without support
and without employment--its isolation and dryness occasion great
pain, and the thoughts assail it most grievously. Persons in
this condition must have greater purity of conscience than those
who can make use of their understanding; for he who can use his
intellect in the way of meditation on what the world is, on what
he owes to God, on the great sufferings of God for him, his own
scanty service in return, and on the reward God reserves for
those who love Him, learns how to defend himself against his own
thoughts, and against the occasions and perils of sin. On the
other hand, he who has not that power is in greater danger, and
ought to occupy himself much in reading, seeing that he is not in
the slightest degree able to help himself.

12. This way of proceeding is so exceedingly painful, that if the
master who teaches it insists on cutting off the succours which
reading gives, and requires the spending of much time in prayer,