“Therefore, all your care and attention must be concentrated on keeping watch, and it is particularly necessary for you to guard against sin in the place where it usually begins, to resist temptation at once the very first time it appears and thus to eliminate the evil before it can grow and spread. When something has to be feared from its smallest beginnings and is the more easily overcome the more speedily it is resisted, one must not wait for it to grow; that is why divine scripture exclaims: Keep your heart with all vigilance; for from it flow the springs of life (Pr.4.23). 27, 1. One has to make a distinction, however, between those of one’s thoughts which the will favors and embraces affectionately, and those which are wont to flit past the mind like an insubstantial shadow and merely show a glimpse of themselves in passing - the Greeks call them typoi, ‘impressions’ - and also those, to be sure, which offer promptings to a mind which is resistant and unwilling and as glad when they are expelled as it was sad when they were admitted in the first place. In those which show themselves only fleetingly to the mind and reveal themselves as if in flight, there is no underlying sin at all and no sign of fight; but with those which the soul struggles against for some time and which the will resists, we can expect an even contest. Either we consent to them and are conquered or we reject them and conquer them and win a victory in battle. Thus sin exists only in the thought which has given the mind’s consent to a suggestion, which flatters and fosters its own evil tendency and longs for it to erupt into action. This kind of thought, even if it is prevented from reaching any outcome and so fails to fulfill the wish that lies behind it, is nevertheless condemned as a criminal act by the Lord.” SinBattleThoughts Book:The Letters of Pelagius Source: The Letters of Pelagius