The natural will. The only compensation it offers
is earthly glory, even when through God's
gift it rises to a higher wisdom.
From this animal will, which is the only one found in those adults who are insane and remain deprived of the use of reason, man rises to the level of the natural will.
Though at this stage the will can, before it is guided by the Spirit of God, raise itself above its animal impulses, still, as long as it does not share in divine charity, it busies itself with earthly and perishable things. When led by it at this level, human hearts do not, it is true, undergo the
shameful slavery of bodily pleasures, but rule their desires according to the laws of justice and probity. They do not, however, merit any higher reward than earthly glory.
Although they succeed in leading the present life in a becoming manner, still they do not reap the reward of eternal happiness. For they do not refer their righteous actions and good endeavours to the praise and honour of Him who gave them the power of actually fostering a higher wisdom and of gaining greater glory than others.
Some, in fact, have applied their minds not only to the practice of the useful arts and to the study of the liberal sciences, but also to the quest of the supreme Good. They clearly saw and understood the invisible things of God by the things that are made. But, failing to give thanks to
God and acknowledge Him as the author of this their faculty, they professed themselves to be wise; that is, they gloried not in God but in themselves, as if they had reached the knowledge of truth through their own efforts of reasoning. They became vain in their thoughts, and
what they had gained in the light of God's grace, they lost again in the blindness of their pride. They fell back from the heavenly light into their own darkness, that is, from the changeless and eternal Good to their own fickle and corruptible nature.
Such men, therefore, return to self-love. They are so pleased with themselves, that whatever they judge praise- worthy in their own persons, they do not refer to God's gifts; they claim it as their own merit and attribute it to the efforts of their own wills. Consequently, they
remain below the level of the spiritual will. They possess in themselves nothing to lead them on to eternal life, for they actually begin to spoil in their own hearts those very natural gifts of God, and they pass from a rightful use of
them to the practice of unnumbered vices.
The Founding Fathers of America (There were no founding mothers) were Judaised Protestants who believed that wealth was an ineluctable sign of Predestined election and their aim was to use the Old Testament as the guide to build an earthly paradise in America- the secular city on the hill heresy most recently promoted by Ronnie Reagan - and there was no consideration of the truth that life on earth is a test and that even the secular government has a duty to offer public worship of God and so we are where we are now owing to the perfidy of the protestants- and the Catholic Bishops who accept (ed) and promote (d) religious liberty/The Americanist heresy
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