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Perfection of life is in Charity and “the means, par excellence, to reach the perfection of Charity and practice it - means, that is linked with the end - is divine contemplation, or union with God by an experimental loving and ineffable knowledge, which all may desire to receive from the grace of God, in particular by the assiduous practice of mental prayer…
Description
The contemplative life is better than the active life and constitutes, when it overflows in the apostolate of souls, the state of life, that is purely and simply the most perfect. The contemplation of God, being at the very apex of Christian life, is not a means directed to the moral virtues and the labours of the active life as to an end. It is, on the contrary, the end to which these are directed as means and dispositions. The moral virtues bear to the contemplative life the relation of dispositions thereto.' If • The moral virtues prepare for contemplation by producing peace and purity in the soul.' Of the virtue of Prudence, St. Thomas says that ' it is in the employment of Wisdom as the doorkeeper is in the employment of the king.' " But we cannot get on without the services of the doorkeeper. Without the practice of the moral virtues, without a radical detachment from all created things, without an extreme delicacy of conscience in maintaining purity of mind and will and in following the movements of the Holy Ghost, it is impossible to make progress in prayer and contemplation.
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