The Four Tests of Discernment

This power of discernment, then, will be needed by us in the fourfold way we have described. First, the material must not escape our notice: is it true gold or painted? Second, we must reject as forged and counterfeit coins those thoughts that falsely promise works of religion, since they are not rightly stamped and bear a false image of the king. Third, we must be able in the same way to detect those that give the precious gold of Scripture a false and heretical meaning, and so show the image not of the true king but of a usurper. Fourth, we must refuse those whose weight and value the rust of vanity has lowered and has not allowed to pass in the scales of the fathers, as coins that are too light, false, and short in weight. So we will not suffer what the Lord’s command warns us to avoid with all our strength, and lose the value and reward of all our labor: “Do not lay up for yourselves treasures on earth, where rust and moth destroy and where thieves break in and steal.” For whenever we do anything with a view to human glory, we know that, as the Lord says, we are laying up treasure for ourselves on earth. Being, as it were, hidden in the ground and buried in the earth, it must be destroyed by various demons, or eaten away by the biting rust of empty glory, or devoured by the moths of pride, so that it brings no use or profit to the man who hid it. [a]

We should, then, constantly search all the inner rooms of our hearts and trace with the closest investigation the footprints of whatever enters them. Otherwise some beast of the mind, so to speak, a lion or a dragon, passing through, may have stealthily left the dangerous marks of its track, and through our carelessness about our thoughts these will show others the way into the secret recesses of the heart. And so, turning up the ground of our heart daily and hourly with the plow of the gospel, that is, the constant remembrance of the Lord’s cross, we will manage to stamp out or root up from our hearts the lairs of harmful beasts and the hiding places of poisonous serpents.