Continued on the Hidden Action of Baptismal Grace in the Person. Illustrations Likening Grace to Leaven in Dough and Fire in Iron. Coming of Age, a Person Must Confirm God’s Grace in Himself by Free Will. The Danger of Stopping Halfway. Full, Wholehearted Resolution to Serve God

I trust that you have retained and hold in memory that a Christian is not simple but composite—made up of nature and grace. I now want to make clear to you that the saved—those who will enter into the eternal Kingdom of God—are only those in whom grace does not remain hidden but unfolds, permeates our entire being, and becomes visible even outwardly, as though absorbing our nature into itself.

Attend to the word of the Savior! He says that the Kingdom of God is like a woman who, taking leaven, puts it into dough (Mt. 13:33). The dough, having received the leaven, does not sour all at once; this requires its own time. The leaven placed inside gradually permeates all the dough—and all the dough becomes leavened: the bread from it then comes out light, fragrant, and tasty. In exactly the same way, grace, having been poured into our nature, does not permeate it all at once, but little by little. Then, when it permeates all, the entire nature becomes graced. And the deeds that a person afterward performs are all deeds of a special kind. Though they appear to be the same kinds of deeds as those of everyone else, they carry a special fragrance, a special taste, and a special resonance. God receives them as deeds especially pleasing to Him.

I take another comparison to explain how grace, when given room to act, having permeated all our nature, then comes to the surface and becomes visible to all who are capable of seeing. Just as fire, penetrating iron, does not remain only within the iron but comes to the surface and makes its fiery power tangibly felt by all—so also grace, having penetrated all our nature, then becomes palpably visible to all. All who come into contact with such a grace-filled person feel the extraordinary power dwelling in him, manifesting itself in him in various ways. When he begins to speak about something spiritual, everything comes out clearly, as in broad daylight, and his word goes straight to the soul and there authoritatively forms the feelings and dispositions corresponding to it. And even when he is not speaking, a warmth emanates from him that warms everything, and a certain power issues from him that awakens moral energy and engenders a readiness for every kind of spiritual deed and exploit.

We receive the grace of God through Holy Baptism in infancy. From that very moment it begins to act in us and to accomplish its work, in the hope that when we come of age we ourselves, by our own free decision, will begin to zealously do everything that in the work of salvation depends on our own labors. When a family is devout and raises children in Christian patterns of life, grace by itself brings peace to their inward life, and they emerge meek, humble, obedient, merciful, reverent, and full of the fear of God. Examples of this are visible everywhere.

I would point to you as well, if I were not afraid that you might become conceited—though there is as yet little reason for much self-congratulation here, since nothing has yet been added from your own labors. Everything that appears good is someone else’s doing, given and cultivated by others. What now stands before you is: to come to love all this good and to resolve in your heart to guard, elevate, and multiply it. True, you stand on good foundations and have been set on a good road, but your own will and free decision have not yet been involved in any of this. And if you do not apply them now, everything that has been laid in you by the preceding upbringing will not be firm, and under unfavorable circumstances it will scatter, leaving behind only a pleasant—or perhaps an unpleasant—memory.

Remember what happened to you when you were plunged into the whirlpool of worldly life? Who was it that then oppressed and crushed your heart? Everything good in you was warmed by the grace of God through your devout family upbringing. Why then were you oppressed? Because you allowed yourself to feel some sympathy toward those disordered patterns of life. Though you did not tell me this, it follows by itself from the anguish that afterward tormented you. Had there been no such sympathy, there would have been no anguish. And I wrote to you that if necessity should compel you to plunge again into such a whirlpool, you should not set your heart on anything you see or hear there. And if you do not set your heart on it, you will not experience anguish either. Somehow I do not hear whether you go there and, when you do, whether you act as I wrote to you. You yourselves must look to this. After all, you are mistress of yourself; you are entering the age of independent action. I will say only this: from you there will emerge either the same kind of empty, vain, and passionate personality as all the rest, or neither one thing nor the other. A personality of the first kind will emerge when you give yourself wholly to that life. Then you will forget everything past that was good, holy, and spiritual, and will stand in a hostile relation to it. Knowing you, I am confident that this will not happen with you. But I cannot deny the possibility of the second case: you may turn out to be neither one thing nor the other—neither spiritual nor worldly, neither a Christian nor a pagan. This will happen when you, while keeping the devout patterns in which you were raised, do not guard your heart from sympathy toward the patterns of worldly life. Remember: I mean sympathy, not participation, which is sometimes necessary, as you say. This sympathy will not drive you away from your former ways, but it will cool you toward them, and you will drag along in them by habit alone, not by the heart’s choice. In substance, you will be neither in the worldly sphere nor in the truly spiritual sphere: you will be neither one thing nor the other.

And what will come of it for you? The same that the Lord already pronounced in the Apocalypse upon one of the angels of the Churches: ”I know your works, that you are neither cold nor hot: I could wish you were cold or hot. So then, because you are lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot, I will vomit you out of My mouth” (Rev. 3:15–16). One must be burning toward God and all that is divine, and cold toward everything worldly and temporal. If you turn out to be neither cold toward the worldly nor hot toward the divine—but half-warm and half-cold toward both—you will be rejected by God. So what is to be done? You must now choose with your heart a holy, God-pleasing, spiritual Christian life—now, precisely now, when you are entering the period of independent life. All my speech has been leading toward this. Make this choice—and you will be delivered from the danger of being neither one thing nor the other. May the Lord bless and enlighten you!