It is,
therefore, of most vital importance for you to form in your own heart
an agreeable and useful society with which you can always converse.
This society you carry with you wherever you go, for you are with
yourself at all times; and since you have not always the satisfaction
to enjoy the company of others you should learn how to turn to good
account this privation by making it an incentive to cultivate with
industry an agreeable society in your own heart; and the best way to
insure the success of this work is to accustom yourself to converse
with God who is always present in your heart, except when you expel
him by mortal sin.
The work itself must be made up of pious readings, meditation and
prayer, which will furnish you with such thoughts and affections as
will prove to be constant friends in pain as in joy; hasten to amass
these honeyed treasures during the noon-tide of life; for the winter
will soon come upon you, the flowers of life shall lose their perfume
and their withered corolla shall be strewn on the ground. Then you
will not have time to enrich the soul with the longed-for booty when
you will be reduced to the miserable condition of those women who
endeavor to conceal the poverty of their mind and heart by a foolish
and puerile deception.
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