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
The sons of the world recognize absent-mindedness as innocent, and the Holy Fathers recognize it as the beginning of all evils (882).
A man who is devoted to absent-mindedness has a very easy, most superficial conception of all subjects, even the most important ones.
An absent-minded person is usually inconstant: his heartfelt sensations are devoid of depth and strength, and therefore they are unstable and short-lived.
As a moth flutters from flower to flower, so an absent-minded person passes from one earthly pleasure to another, from one vain care to another.
An absent-minded person is a stranger to love his neighbor: he looks indifferently at the misfortune of people and easily lays on them burdens that are unbearable.
Sorrows have a strong effect on the distracted precisely because he does not expect them. He expects only joys.
If sorrow is strong, but transient, then the distracted soon forgets it in the noise of amusements. Long-term sorrow crushes him.