Article III. On Interior Acts

The passages in this chapter are veiled. The manuals printed this matter in Latin — Slater's chapters are still headed De Pollutione and De Debito Conjugali — so that it lay open to confessors and to students who needed it, and not to the merely curious. Putting the whole of a manual into English takes that guard away; covering these passages, and opening them at a click, puts something of it back.

St. Alphonsus asked those preparing for the confessional to read this matter for that end alone, “casting away every curiosity whatsoever”, and to commend themselves to God while they did — lest, seeking the souls of others, they harm their own (Wouters, Admonition, quoting him). Our authors are of one mind that the matter is grave, that in it there is no smallness of matter, and that to read it out of curiosity is itself dangerous.

“How oft the sight of means to do ill deeds makes ill deeds done.”— Shakespeare, King John, IV, ii

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365.

The twofold genus of interior acts.

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365. - The interior acts which pertain here can conveniently be gathered into a twofold genus.

Impure Thoughts

¶1900.

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Some, more intellectual, are physically immune from carnal pleasure; others, on the contrary, stir the flesh in the present.

Impure Thoughts

Within this article

I. On Interior Acts Insofar as They Excite the Fleshnn. 366–367
II. On More Intellectual Actsnn. 368–371