No One Falls All at Once

But we must not imagine that anyone slips and comes to ruin by a sudden fall. When a person falls into hopeless collapse, it is either because he was led astray by a bad beginning in his training, or because the good qualities of his soul gave way through a long stretch of carelessness of mind, so that his faults gained ground on him little by little. For “Loss goes before destruction, and an evil thought before a fall.” In the same way, no house ever falls to the ground in a sudden collapse. It falls only when there is some long-standing flaw in the foundation, or when, through the long neglect of those who live in it, what was at first only a little drip finds its way through. So the walls that protect it are ruined by degrees, and through long neglect the gaps grow larger and break open, and in time the drenching storm and rain pour in like a river. For “By laziness a building is thrown down, and through idle hands the house will leak.” And the same Solomon tells us in other words that the same thing happens spiritually to the soul, when he says: “Water dripping drives a man out of the house on a stormy day.” [a]

So he fittingly compares carelessness of mind to a roof and to tiles that have not been looked after. Through them, at first, only very slight drippings, so to speak, of the passions make their way into the soul. But if these are ignored as small and trifling, then the beams of the virtues will rot and be carried away by a great storm of sins. Through these, “on a stormy day,” that is, in the time of temptation, the devil’s attack will fall on us, and the soul will be driven out of the dwelling of virtue in which it had lived, as in a house of its own, for as long as it kept up all its watchful diligence.

When we had heard this, we were so immensely delighted with our spiritual meal that the joy of mind this conference filled us with outweighed the sorrow we had felt before over the death of the saints. For we were not only taught about the things that had puzzled us, but from the raising of that question we also learned some things that our understanding had been too small for us to ask about. [d]