“IF we demanded it of you for your perfection exquisite and extraordinary things, elevations and lofty contemplations, you might excuse yourself, saying that you could not venture so high. If we demanded of you daily disciplines to blood, or fasting on bread and water, or going barefoot with a perpetual hairshirt, you might say that you did not feel strong enough for that. But that is not what we demand of you, nor in that does your perfection lie, but in doing the very thing that you are doing, taking care that it be well done. With the same works that you are doing, if you like, you can be perfect: the cost is already paid, you need not add more works. Who will not be animated hereby to be perfect, when perfection comes so ready to his hand, and lies in a thing so familiar and so feasible?
“God said to His people, to animate them to His service and the observance of His law: The commandment that I give thee this day is not a thing very far and very exalted above thee, nor is it set there on the horn of the moon, that thou shouldst be able to say: which of us can mount up to heaven to reach it? Nor again is it a thing on the far side of the sea, that thou shouldst take occasion to say: who shall be able to cross the sea, and bring it hither from such a distance? No, it is very near and very ready to thy hand (Deut. xxx. 11). We may say the same of the perfection of which we now speak. So with this consideration the blessed St. Antony exhorted and animated his disciples to perfection. “The Greeks,” he said, “to attain to philosophy and the other sciences, take great journeys and long voyages, with great labour and risk to themselves: but we, to attain virtue and perfection, which is the true wisdom, have no need to put ourselves to such labours and perils, not even to stir out of our house; since within the house we shall find it, and even within ourselves. The kingdom of God is within you (Luke xvii. 21). Grdeci studia transmarina sectantur, regnum autem coelorum intra vos est.In these ordinary and daily things that you do, your perfection lies.”
— Alphonsus Rodriguez, S.J., Practice of Perfection and Christian Virtues (1609)
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