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Religious Life

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 August 2024

Extract

It is with a consciousness of our own sins and failings that religious life makes its appeal to us. We enter the cloister because we are conscious of evil in our hearts. It is not indeed of itself a sufficient motive to force anyone into religious life far less to keep him there, this consciousness of sin, the mere sense of sin. We were drawn by the fact of positive love of God. It is not the mere escaping from danger. To look upon a cloister as a place from which is shut out temptation, a haven of rest, cannot be a motive. It does not take us long to find we cannot escape temptation as long as we have our own hearts, from them we cannot escape. A stricter relationship with the outside world may alter our temptations, that's all. We do not shut out the worst offender—ourselves.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © 1947 Provincial Council of the English Province of the Order of Preachers

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Footnotes

1

From a Retreat preached in Edinburgh, July 1932.