There is one condition of being able to do a good supernatural work, which always comes first, and that is, that the person shall be in the state of grace when he does it. God can find no pleasure in us so long as our will and affections are turned away from Him, and this is the case when we are in mortal sin.
Again, our merit will be in proportion to the excellence of the work in itself considered. One apple is better than another, though both have grown upon the same branch. To attend the bedside of some poor sick person, is a more excellent work than merely to bestow an alms upon him. To be contrite for one's sins, is more excellent than to do penitential works in expiation of them. To forgive the injury of one's enemy, is more excellent than to pardon the unkindness of an acquaintance. The poorest effort at self-control, is better than the best advice given to another. I remember a story which shows what even one excellent work will do for a soul. It is in "The Lives of the Fathers of the Desert." A monk, who was serving God with much prayer and self-denial, was tempted with the desire to see a man whose merit in the sight of God should be the very counterpart of his own. God gratified his weakness. He was directed to go to a certain inn in a neighboring village where he would see such a man. { 323} On reaching it, there stood before the door a poor fiddler playing for pennies. The monk understood, by an interior light, that this was the man. Much surprised, and rather mortified too, he nevertheless addressed the fiddler, and asked him what sort of a life he had led, and what he was then doing for God? He answered, that he had, for many years, gained a poor but honest livelihood in the same humble employment. That as to his having done any thing very good, he did not know about that, although there was one thing that he always remembered with a great deal of satisfaction. "With some danger to myself, I once rescued a poor girl from those who would have ruined her." The good monk was made to understand, that for preventing that outrage, God had raised this poor fiddler to a great purity of soul.
A good work, again, is more excellent in proportion as it is more difficult. What a consolation this ought to be to us! How hard we think it sometimes to get on in life, with its multiplied vexations and discouragements! { 324} We say, "What a strange world!" "What a weary world!" In the language of Holy Scripture we say, "_In the morning, who will grant me evening? and at evening, who will grant me morning?_" [Footnote 146] as though things were turning out very different from what we had a right to expect.