CHAPTER II.
ILLUSIONS OF YOUTH, VALUE OF TIME AT THIS PERIOD OF LIFE.
The age of youth is the age of illusions, ardent desires, and
fanciful hopes. Youth is like a fairy whose magical wand evokes the
most graceful images and the most alluring phantoms. This ignorance
of the doleful realities concealed in the future is a gift of divine
goodness which, in order that life might not be too bitter, casts a
beneficent veil over the sorrows that await us; God screens the
future from us to let us enjoy the present. Far be it from me to
remove this veil which renders you such kind service. But, apart from
this screen which the good God has placed between you and the
miseries of this life, there is another of a darker and heavier
shade, fabricated by the imagination, and which it draws with a
perfidious complacency over the object which it behooves us the most
to know and avoid--a seductive and deceitful veil which, while
presenting things to us in a false light, exposes us to most
deplorable illusions and inevitable dangers.
God permits that we should ignore many things, but He does not wish
that we should be deceived in anything.
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