Its point is blunted, its light is dimmed; darkness and coldness of negligence and insensibility spread in the soul.

Insensibility finally becomes an ordinary state of the soul. Often she is satisfied with it; often recognizes it as a state pleasing to God, peace of conscience, and this is the loss of the sense of one's sinfulness, the loss of the sense of grace-filled spiritual life, the slumber and blindness of conscience [880].

In such a state, with terrible darkness and insensibility, various sins freely enter the soul, making a den for themselves in it. Sins, ossified in the soul, turn into habits as strong as nature, and sometimes even stronger than nature. Sinful habits are called passions. Man does not notice this, and he is imperceptibly bound everywhere by sin, in captivity to it, in slavery.

Whoever, constantly ignoring the reminders of conscience, has allowed himself to fall into the slavery of sin, will only with the greatest difficulty, with the help of God's special help, be able to break the chains of this slavery, to conquer the passions, which have turned into natural qualities, as it were.

Most beloved brother! Guard your conscience with all possible attention and diligence.

Guard your conscience in relation to God: fulfill all the commandments of God, both visible to all and invisible to anyone, visible and known only to God and your conscience.

Guard your conscience in relation to your neighbor: do not be satisfied with the mere plausibility of your behavior towards your neighbors! seek from yourself that your very conscience be satisfied with this behavior. It will be satisfied when not only your deeds, but also your heart are placed in the relationship to your neighbor commanded by the Gospel.

Guard your conscience towards things, shunning excess, luxury, negligence, remembering that all the things you use are God's creations, God's gifts to man.

Keep your conscience for yourself. Do not forget that you are the image and likeness of God, that you are obliged to present this image in purity and holiness to God Himself.

Woe, woe! if the Lord does not recognize His image, does not find in it any resemblance to Himself. He will pronounce a terrible sentence: I do not take you [881]. The obscene image will be cast into the unquenchable flame of hell.

Infinite joy will envelop the soul at which the Lord, having looked, will recognize in it a likeness to Himself, will see in it that beauty which He, in His infinite goodness, appropriated to it at creation, restored and multiplied at the Redemption, which He commanded to be observed in immaculate integrity by shunning all sin, keeping all the commandments of the Gospel.

Conscience is the unceasing, impartial guardian and reminder of such removal and preservation. Amen.

On an Absent-Minded and Attentive Life