26. For those newly engaged in spiritual warfare the swift path to the recovery of virtue consists in the silencing of the lips, the closure of the eyes and the stopping of the ears; for once the intellect has achieved this kind of intermission and has sealed off the external entrances to itself, it begins to understand itself and its own activities. It immediately sets about interrogating the ideas swimming in the noetic sea of its thought, trying to discern whether the concepts that irrupt into the mind's crucible are pure, alloyed with no bitter seed, and conferred by an angel of light, or
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