Three factors alone are of concern to us: Truth, Way, and Virtue. God will hold us accountable for these three points; He will not hold us accountable for the modern world or for understanding His motives in having allowed a given evil.

Metaphysical Truth, with all the discernments deriving from it and required by our encounters with phenomena; next the Way, which is prayer in general and invocation in particular; and finally Virtue, which means the absence of all the defects that demean and mar the soul: this is all. Nothing and no one in the modern world prevents you from understanding and accepting metaphysical Truth or from distinguishing what is real from what is false or right from wrong; nothing and no one prevents you from invoking God every day; and nothing and no one prevents you from being virtuous.

There is no question of living in our times as men lived in the Middle Ages. In the first place this is impossible, and besides there is no reason for doing so. The Truth—or God—could never ask something unreasonable or impossible of us. If someone said to me that Truth, Way, and Virtue cannot be followed in the modern world, I would respond that there is no reason they cannot and indeed that there are thousands and even millions of men who do so. Spirituality, at whatever degree, makes no distinction between ancient man and modern man, for it is not concerned with “such and such men” but with “men as such”—in other words with the unchanging factors that define man or human nature. In this respect, which is the only one that matters, there is no difference between the men who lived during the period of the Council of Nicaea and those alive during the pseudo-Council of Vatican II. Likewise, two plus two have always equaled four, in the age of the Apostles as in our own. This is all that matters.

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