I learned from your letters that you often lose temper and have no peace with your sister and that sometimes you feel that you might just as well stick your head in the noose. Meanwhile, it is high time for you, and especially for Marisha, to know that there is Devil and demons, which, out of their extreme spitefulness, are anxious to destroy every person in any possible way. This is how they do it: they usually focus their energy on human passions and blow them up to the effect of a destructive force for human life.
Take for example, a man who is disposed to drinking. They will compel him to drink more and more , drawing him further on to hard drinking, fistfights, to murder and to suicide and thus achieving this man’s inevitable and ultimate destruction. As regards other people, they will induce some to steal, others – to become haughty, conceited and pride, alluring them into spiritual temptation and thus destroying them. The evil spirits have got many other ways to bring people to eternal perish.
Similarly, the demons are seeking to destroy Marisha and you, or at least one of the two. How are they trying to achieve this goal? You know only too well how. Demons instigate quarrel between you heating you up to the effect that you are ready to beat up each other, upsetting you and making your consciousness so clouded that you begin pondering the idea of being hanged rather than to continue to live like this, as a better outcome of the distress. If you or anyone, for that matter, begin cherishing this idea for a brief moment, demons would try with even greater force and with the help of other, more powerful demons ( bringing along “seven other spirits, more wicked” than themselves, according to the Gospel)to inculcate the idea of suicide deeper into your mind. If man does not resist this devilish idea resolutely and employing all his strength, but instead show acquiescence, weak though it may be, God might allow demons to have this man hanged for his passions, unrepentance and anger; the demons would be only happy to provide a rope or a towel and assist this man in committing suicide.
Katya, when you are calm, think about how clouded in mind one must be to agree to eternal and horrible torment because of some insignificant distress. Hard as life might be here, even if we had to live one thousand years suffering through enormous hardships, the end will come one day, whereas in in Hell, there will be no end to torments.
Just imagine yourself captured by a gang of one hundred bandits who would torture you whole day. How would you fill? Here on earth you would find relief, if only in death. A suicide will be seized by demons, who are much worse and crueler and much more repulsive – by many thousand times – than all existing bandits; and they will be free to do whatever they want to torture their victim; they would be all-powerful there; besides them, there is only fire that sheds no light and ”is not quench” and “their worm that dieth not “… Those would be tortures without end… Horrors! To ponder the idea of suicide because Marisha is being bad or malicious, because she rejects something, that she does not want to do as she should, or because she offended you. If you are unable to tolerate so little inconvenience, why don’t you fear hellish intolerable torments?
You would say that at such moments you are not thinking, but just feeling that you might just as well to stick your head in the noose.
Where there is God there is peace, light, wisdom and joy. Where there is Devil, there is disorder, darkness of the soul and obscurity of mind, despair and readiness to evil-doing.
I have spoken to you about this many times. Perhaps, I should say again, for the last time, to warn you: Don’t offer your hand to the Devil. Pray to God when you are calm and ask Him to keep you off any obscurity not to allow demons to take the upper hand over you. The Lord will protect you, if you decide against falling down into the Hell. Remember Judas. He permitted the Devil to penetrate and he died an awful death and doomed himself to eternal sufferings at the bottom of the Hell.
Katya, don’t treat lightly such things. Try to keep your mind off such thoughts. May the Lord help you understand the above said and escape demons’ hands here and in the future life, so that, having endured a little here, you may enter into the Kingdom of God, into everlasting joy and blissfulness.
Be healthy bodily and spiritually.
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