for your ills, when they did not even know them?
Your chief maladies are pride, which takes you away from God, and lust,
which binds you to earth; and they have done nothing else but cherish one or
other of these diseases. If they gave you God as an end, it was only to
administer to your pride; they made you think that you are by nature like
Him and conformed to Him. And those who saw the absurdity of this claim put
you on another precipice, by making you understand that your nature was like
that of the brutes, and led you to seek your good in the lusts which are
shared by the animals. This is not the way to cure you of your
unrighteousness, which these wise men never knew. I alone can make you
understand who you are...."

Adam, Jesus Christ.

If you are united to God, it is by grace, not by nature. If you are humbled,
it is by penitence, not by nature.

Thus this double capacity...

You are not in the state of your creation.

As these two states are open, it is impossible for you not to recognise
them. Follow your own feelings, observe yourselves, and see if you do not
find the lively characteristics of these two natures. Could so many
contradictions be found in a simple subject?

Incomprehensible. Not all that is incomprehensible ceases to exist. Infinite
number. An infinite space equal to a finite.

Incredible that God should unite Himself to us. This consideration is drawn
only from the sight of our vileness. But if you are quite sincere over it,
follow it as far as I have done and recognise that we are indeed so vile
that we are incapable in ourselves of knowing if His mercy cannot make us
capable of Him. For I would know how this animal, who knows himself to be so
weak, has the right to measure the mercy of God and set limits to it,
suggested by his own fancy. He has so little knowledge of what God is that
he does not know what he himself is, and, completely disturbed at the sight