To Donatus 5

But if you hold to the way of innocence and justice with the unslipping firmness of your step, if, depending on God with all your strength and with all your heart, you are only what you have begun to be, so much freedom of action is given you as spiritual grace increases. For there is no measure or limit in receiving God's gift, as is the custom with earthly benefits. The Spirit, flowing forth abundantly, is confined by no bounds, nor is it bridled within fixed limits by restraining barriers. It flows continually, it overflows abundantly: only let our heart thirst and be open. As much capacious faith as we bring there, so much overflowing grace we draw. Thence power is given, with sober chastity, sound mind, and pure voice, to be able to extinguish the venom of poisons for the healing of the suffering, to cleanse the stains of foolish minds by restoring health, to command peace for the hostile, quiet for the violent, gentleness for the raging; to compel by threatening rebukes to confession the unclean and wandering spirits who have plunged themselves into men to overthrow them, to press them with hard blows to depart, to stretch them out, struggling, howling, groaning, with the increase of a spreading punishment, to beat them with scourges, to roast them with fire. The thing is done there and is not seen: the blow is hidden, the punishment manifest. So in what we have already begun to be, the Spirit we have received enjoys its freedom; in that we have not yet changed our body and members, our fleshly sight is still blinded by the cloud of the world. How great is this power of the soul, how great its strength: not only to be itself withdrawn from the deadly contacts of the world, so that, cleansed and pure, it is caught by no stain of the attacking enemy, but even to become greater and stronger in its powers, so that it rules with commanding right over the whole army of the raging adversary!