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Updated: June 11, 2025
Meditation teaches us to know God and ourself; it lays open to us our faults and vices, their source and fatal consequences and the arms we should employ to combat them. Finally, meditation contributes most efficiently to form our minds and purify our hearts, to fortify the will and develop in us the habit of reflecting.
Here the view always fixes when we are actuated by either of these passions. According as our idea of ourself is more or less advantageous, we feel either of those opposite affections, and are elated by pride, or dejected with humility.
The knowledge of God and ourself is such an important factor in the work of our spiritual perfection that St. Augustin constantly prayed for it, saying: "Lord grant that I may know Thee and myself."
Solitude has the advantage or the danger of making us continually search more deeply into the same ideas. As our discourse is only with ourself, we always give the same direction to the conversation; we are not called to turn it to the subject which occupies another mind, or interests another's feelings; and so an involuntary inclination makes us return forever to knock at the same doors!
How do we determine that we are not dreaming, and that we shall not wake up to-morrow morning and find ourself on the Arno? Perhaps we are not really back again where there are no "Eremites and friars, White, black, and gray, with all their trumpery." Perhaps we are a flamingo, a banyan-tree, or a mandarin. But there stands the tea-cup, and our identity is sure!
But the humour itself was too self-pleasing, while it lasted we know how bare we lay ourself in the confession to be abandoned all at once with the grounds of it.
He is neither subtilized into an idea by pure thinking nor civilized into a gentleman by social laws and prejudices. Spanish art and letters deal with concrete, tangible persons. Now, there is no more concrete, no more tangible person for every one of us than ourself.
Then she would insist on trying to carry it upstairs, but was not long enough in the arms, and Aunt M'riar had to do it for her in the end. Not, however, unwillingly, because it enabled her to give her mind to pinking or gauffering, or whatever other craft was then engaging her attention. We do not ourself know what pinking is, or gauffering; we have only heard them referred to.
It was almost time to start for church, and we needed the animal harnessed. The boy came in saying it was impossible to catch the bay mare, and calling for our assistance. We had on our best clothes, and did not feel like exposing ourself to rough usage; but we vaulted the fence with pail of water in hand, expecting to try the effect of rewards rather than punishments.
It is the Golden Rule in manifestation; we see in the one to whom we are merciful ourself in another form, under different conditions, and we do to him as we would have him do to us. It seems to require a certain maturity of mind, acquired or inherited; children below puberty seldom have it. It is easily forfeited, and indifference to the suffering of others is readily established.
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