1. Many of these beginners also sometimes have a lot of spiritual greed, because they will hardly see them happy in the spirit that God gives them; they are very heartbroken and complaining because they do not find the comfort they would like in spiritual things. Many do not just get fed up with hearing advice and learning spiritual precepts and having and reading many books that deal with that, and their time is spent more on this than on carrying out the mortification and perfection of the interior poverty of spirit that they should. Because, in addition to this, they are loaded with very curious images and rosaries; now they leave some, and take others; now they barter, now they destroy; now they love them this way, now that way, becoming more fond of this cross than that, because it is more curious. And you will see other herds of "agnusdeis" and relics and payrolls, like the children of charms.
In which I condemn the property of heart and the attachment that they have to the manner, multitude and curiosity of things, insofar as it is very against the poverty of spirit, which only looks at the substance of devotion, taking advantage of only what is enough to her, and getting tired of that other multiplicity and her curiosity; since true devotion has to come out of the heart, only in the truth and substance of what spiritual things represent, and everything else is hold and property of imperfection, which, in order to pass to some kind of perfection, it is necessary to be finish such an appetite.
2. I knew a person who for more than ten years took advantage of a cross roughly made from a blessed bouquet, nailed with a twisted pin around it, and had never left it, bringing it with him until I took it from him; and he was not a person of little reason and understanding. And I saw another who prayed for beads that were made of bones from fish bones, whose devotion it is certain that for this reason she was not less carats before God; because it is clear that they did not have it in the workmanship and value.
Those who are, then, on the right path from these principles, do not cling to visible instruments, nor are they burdened with them, nor are they given anything to know more than what is convenient to know in order to act; because they only set their eyes on getting right with God and pleasing him, and in this is their covetousness. And so with great generosity they give everything they have, and their pleasure is to know how to be left without it for God and for the charity of their neighbor, it does not matter to me that they are spiritual things than temporary; because, as I say, they only set their eyes on the truths of interior perfection: giving God pleasure, and not themselves in anything.
3. But neither can the soul be fully purified of these imperfections, as of the others, until God puts it in the passive purgation of that dark night that we will talk about later. But it is convenient for the soul, as far as it can, to try on its part to improve itself, because it deserves that God puts it in that divine cure, where the soul heals from everything that it was not able to remedy; Because, no matter how much the soul helps itself, it cannot actively purify itself in such a way that it is disposed in the least part for the divine union of perfection of love, if God does not take the hand and purge it in that dark fire for it, how and in the way that we have to say.