You are angry with your neighbor, your brother, and say of him: ” He is such and such—a miser, malicious, proud,” or that he has done this and that, and so on. What is that to you?  He sins against God, and not against you. God is his Judge, not you: unto God he shall answer for himself, not to you. Know yourself, how sinful you are yourself, what a beam you have in your own eye; how difficult it is for you to master and get the better of your own sins; how afflicted you yourself are by them; how they have ensnared you—how you wish for indulgence from others towards your own infirmities.  And your brother is a man like you; therefore you must be indulgent to him as to a sinful man, similar in everything to yourself, as infirm as you; love him, then, as yourself, listening to the Lord saying: “These things I command you, that ye love one another”609; and as you pray for yourself, that the Lord may help you to root out your own cruel and incurable passions, so pray also for your brother, that the Lord may free him from the flattery and corruption of his passions, from their darkness and oppression.

We must remember that we are one sinful body, more or less infected in our members by the breathing of the ” common enemy—the Devil”; and that of ourselves, without God’s grace, we are powerless to free ourselves from this deadly and darkening breathing: only the Holy Ghost by His breathing can drive away this demoniacal darkness of the passions, through the power of the Lord Jesus Christ’s sufferings upon the cross.  We must therefore humbly pray to the Lord, in the spirit of brotherly love, for all our brethren and for all people, that they may escape from the darkness of the passions and their great attractiveness, in which they delight, not knowing their destructiveness; for instance: the rich man rejoices in his wealth; the ambitious one—in his distinctions; the glutton—in his food, drink, and dainties; the malicious—in his malice; the envious—in the sufferings of the victim of his envy; and so on.