Thought for the Day – 12 March – The Last Artifice of the Devil –Making even Virtue, an Occasion of Sin! (Part One)

Thought for the Day – 12 March – The Spiritual Combat (1589) – Dom Lorenzo Scupoli OSM (c1530-1610)

“None shall be crowned who has not fought well.” 2 Tim 2: 5

XXXII: … The Last Artifice of the Devil –
Making even Virtue, an Occasion of Sin!
(Part One)

“The cunning and malicious serpent never fails to tempt us, by his artifices, even by means of the very virtues we have acquired, thus, leading us to regard them and ourselves with complacency, they may become our ruin, exalting us on high, that we may fall into the sin of pride and vainglory!

To preserve yourself from this danger, choose for your battlefield, the safe and level ground of a true and deep conviction of your own nothingness – that you are nothing, that you know nothing, that you can do nothing and have nothing but misery and sin and deserve nothing but eternal damnation.

Entrench yourself firmly within the limits of this truth and suffer not yourself to be enticed, so much as a hair’s breadth therefrom, by any evil thought, or anything else which may befall you; knowing well that there are so many enemies, who would slay or wound you, should you fall into their hands.

In order to acquit yourself well in this exercise of the true knowledge of your own nothingness, observe the following rule:

“As often as you reflect upon yourself
and your own works and worth,
consider always what you are of yourself
and not what you are by the aid of God’s grace
and so, esteem yourself,
as you shall thus find yourself to be.”

Consider first the time before you were in existence and you will see yourself to have been, during all that abyss of eternity, a mere nothing and, that you did nothing and could have done nothing, towards giving yourself an existence!

Next, consider the time since you did receive a being from the sole bounty of God.
And here, also, if you leave to Him that which is His own, (His continual care of you which sustains you every moment of your life), what are you of yourself but still a mere nothing?!

For, undoubtedly, were He to leave you for one moment to yourself, you would instantly return to that first nothingness from whence you were drawn by His Almighty Hand.
It is plain that, in the order of nature and viewed in yourself alone, you have no reason to esteem yourself, or to desire the esteem of others!”

Dom Lorenzo Scupoli