Self-Knowledge and Self-Discipline

From Discipline of the Mind (pp. 160-61) by Fr. Basil William Maturin:

It is not *where* a person is that matters, but what he is thinking about. The whole edifice of the spiritual life may be tottering to its ruin and the enemy rushing in like a flood while the subject of this terrible disaster is on his knees and uttering the sacred words of prayer.

It is within, therefore, that the great battle of life must be fought; it is within, with our own thoughts that we must struggle if we would see the world of men and things as it really is.

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The author, Fr. Maturin, had been a High Church Anglican who converted to Catholicism. He drowned on the Lusitania while en route to America. As the vessel was sinking, Father calmly heard Confessions on the deck of the ship; he was last seen handing a child into a lifeboat with the request, "Find its mother."

"It was a great victory of the human mind which annihilated space and time, and circled the globe with telegraph wires. But greater still is the victory which gives a man strength and courage to receive with equanimity over those wires a message telling him that all he valued in life has been taken from him." - Fr. Maturin.

Requiescat in pace, Pater.