…The struggle begins in each of us from birth, continues throughout life and lasts until death. But what have we to fear in this struggle … if we want it, we have God behind us – and if God with us, who against us ?
The Holy Cross, which has saved us, will always defend us. We have a Mother whose petition can plead all things with the Son; and this Mother loves us, the world and hell, pleasure and vengeance fight against us; Jesus and Mary, the Cross and love stand for us! Let us only believe and love, and our victory!
But alas! we want to fight without faith, to win without love! We believe in ourselves but not in the Cross, we love ourselves but not Mary! and so this faith betrays us, this love fails us. We say that we have faith, but what is faith without works?… and works that do not come from faith are dead! We separate faith from works; there is faith in the word, and faithlessness in the works; in a word, we submit ourselves to the will of God, but in deeds we oppose it, and we become angry if God does not want to submit His most wise and holy will to our will.
With words we forgive wrongs, but with deeds we do not confirm our words. That is: we forgive wrongs that have not been done to us, but for the wrongs even the smallest done to us, we carry in our hearts the venom of hatred and reversal! I would rather forgive everything, only this one thing I cannot; that is: all the wrongs that have not been done to me I will forgive; only that one thing I will not forgive that has been done to me – which means that I do not want to forgive anything!
We believe not what God wants us to believe, but what we ourselves want; we believe not when God wants us to believe, but when we ourselves want to believe – not as God wants us to believe, but as we want to believe! We do not want to take faith from God’s hands, but we give it to ourselves and create it; we have changed God’s faith into human faith, keeping ourselves free to judge and accept or reject it. God has given us freedom by giving us the will; but we have abused the will and have not grasped freedom. We have transformed the freedom of the sons of light into the freedom of the sons of darkness, and therefore this freedom, having misappropriated God, gave birth to bondage and slavishness: bondage of the spirit and slavishness of the flesh. And because the flesh has been made free, the spirit in bondage groans!
Having departed in spirit from God, we have drawn near in flesh to the world – and the world has become our God! From the world we have adopted a new faith, a new morality, and these two faiths are fighting in the soul! What will God say to this? what will the world say to it ? to whom shall we listen? But alas! we hang more from the world than from God; faith in the world, takes the upper hand over faith in God. In words we believe, in deeds we deny God – in words God, in deeds the world. As is our faith, so is our love, for love follows faith.
As long as we believed in God, we loved God and people; as long as we believe in the world, we love the world and ourselves. To depart from God is to depart from the truth; where there is no God, there is no faith – where there is no faith, there is no love – where there is no love, there is no Salvation.
O Mary! Thou art conceived without sin; behold, we, Thy sinful children, feeling all the misery of our hearts, run to Thee and beseech Thee in humility, grant us this grace, that having once purified our souls, we may live the rest of our lives without blemish. Amen.
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The May Devotion. From the manuscripts of Father Karol Antoniewicz S. J. Reprinted separately from the devotional book of the same author. Kraków. 1883.
Catholic during the Great Apostasy 
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