Actually, all gifts have been given for reasons of temporal use and need and they will surely pass away at the end of the present dispensation. Love, however, will never be cut off. It works in us and for us, and not simply in this life. For when the burden of physical need has been laid aside in the time to come it will endure, more effectively, more excellently, forever unfailing, clinging to God with more fire and zeal through all the length of incorruption.

No other virtue makes man more equal to the angels, than the imitation of their way of life.

... a Christian is quite certain to fall into the same sins which he condemns in another with merciless and inhuman severity, for 'a stern king will fall into misfortunes,' and 'one who stops his ears so as not to hear the weak, shall himself cry, and there shall be none to hear him' (Prov. 13:17; 21:13).

The apostles were very sure that everything of theirs which had to do with salvation was a gift to them from God. 'Increase our faith'. They did not presume that the fullness of faith would come to them merely because they freely opted for it. They believed, rather, that it was a gift of God which would have to be granted to them.

The thief who received the kingdom of heaven, though not as the reward of virtue, is a true witness to the fact that salvation is ours through the grace and mercy of God.

God can be sensed when we gaze with trembling hearts at that power of his which controls, guides, and rules everything, when we contemplate his immense knowledge and his knowing look which the secrets of the heart cannot evade.

When the soul is solidly rooted in... peacefulness, when it is freed of the bonds of every carnal urge, when the unshaking thrust of the heart is toward the one supreme Good, then the words of the apostle will be fulfilled. 'Pray without ceasing,' he said (I Thes. 5:17). 'In every place lift up pure hands, with no anger and no rivalry' (I Tim 2:8). Sensibility is, so to speak, absorbed by this purity. It is reshaped in the likeness of the spiritual and the angelic so that all its dealings, all its activity will be prayer, utterly pure, utterly without tarnish.