Let us do our duty well; let us go straight to God; let us work to become very humble, very patient, very mortified, and very charitable.

I feel so strongly about the truths Our Lord taught us by word and example that I cannot help but see how everything done according to that teaching always succeeds perfectly well, while things done the opposite way have a quite different result.

Use gentle methods to get whatever good you can from priests and monks who are slaves, as well as from merchants and captives. Resort to severe measures only in extreme cases, for fear lest the hardship they are already enduring in their state of captivity, joined to the strictness you might want to exercise in virtue of your authority, drive them to despair. . . . It is not light they need, but strength, and strength permeates through the external balm of words and good example.

Let us do our duty well; let us go straight to God; let us work to become very humble, very patient, very mortified, and very charitable.

His Divine Goodness asks that we never do good in any place to make ourselves look important but that we always consider Him directly, immediately, and without intermediary in all our actions.

What you are saying is true of those who want everything to give way to them, nothing to oppose them, everything to go their way, people to obey them without comment or delay and, in a manner of speaking, to be adored.

do not be surprised by your trials, since the Son of God has chosen them for our salvation.