which is said before, is, that you should preserve the same fervour you brought with you, when treading the paths of virtue, you first entered into religion. With what zeal and resolution did you then begin to serve God? Nothing could then impede you, nothing seemed hard; re-assume the same fervour now, pursue your great affair with the same courage, and by this means you will make great progress in virtue. This is what holy men would have us understand by the expedient I last spoke of.
St. Athanasius tells us that St. Anthony being desired by his disciples to give them some advice concerning their spiritual advancement, began his discourse to them in these words: " What I first must recommend to you all in general is, that you never relent in that fervour, with which you first embraced a religious life; but that you still go on, "always increasing it, as if you did but now begin." (Athan. et Surius, torn. i. p. 386.) He repeated the same advice to them upon several other occasions, and the better to imprint it in their minds, when he was near his death, enjoined them the same thing, as his last will and testament, in such pathetic words as expressed in him the tenderness of a father. " As to me," says he, " my dear children, I am shortly entering into the way of my forefathers, according to the Scripture expression; for our Lord already calls me to him, and I have a longing desire to see my heavenly country; but before I go, I must remind you of one thing. That if you will not lose the fruit of all the time you have already spent, and of all the pains and hard labour you have undergone, ever since you entered into religion, you must imagine that you begin only today to embrace a religious life, and must live so, that the fervour and zeal which you had at your first entrance, may daily increase and acquire new strength." If therefore you have a desire to advance in virtue, bear this continually in your mind, and suppose that you are every day to begin anew, and always to continue the same fervour, with which at first you began, by which means you will find it very easy to become a good religious.
St. Austin proposes another means, of which we have treated in one of the preceding chapters; " Forget," says he, " all that is past, and imagine that every day you do but begin." But to return to what we have quoted from St. Anthony, which he was used to explain by a familiar example, and said, that " we ought to apply with the same care and diligence to God's service, as a good servant does to the concerns of his master." A good servant, though he has served his master many years, and taken
