With dispositions such as these there cannot be question of sincere
piety nor of a Christian spirit. Piety resides in the will and
supposes the love of duty; imagination abhors duty and seeks only
after pleasure. True, the grace of God is all-powerful, it is not
tied down to the development of our natural qualities, and God knows
well, when He pleases, how to come to the assistance of the soul's
faculties, and plant the germs of solid virtue in a heart that is
frivolous and badly disposed; still it is an evident fact that among
souls there are some better prepared than others to receive this
divine seed, which takes deeper root when the heart is well disposed.
Now, among all the agents that can unfit us for the reception of
divine grace there is none so bad as an ungoverned imagination,
because it is the source, especially among women, of the most fatal
illusions.
A woman in this condition spends her whole life-time in deceiving
herself and in deceiving others--not purposely, but by a fatal and
voluntary illusion; she can see nothing in its true light; all
objects appear to her under strange colors; she forms her judgment of
them according to the impression they make on the senses, or the
effect they produce in the imagination.
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