Choose a topic from Part 2A:
1. A habit is said to increase inasmuch as its influence on its subject (the person who has it) grows fuller, wider, or more intense.
2. Increase in habit is usually a matter of greater influence, rather than of more instances of the habitual act. Habit does not increase merely by addition of act to act. Sometimes, indeed, more frequently repeated acts come from increased habit, and they may be said, in a sense, to further the increase. But the increase itself is somewhat like that of the growing body which is not measured by mere additional items of food added to the diet, even though the intake of food accompanies growth and furthers it.
3. Hence not every act which springs from habit is an increase of the habit. Indeed, an act which accords with a habit, but is less intense than the habit itself, actually tends to decrease the habit rather than to increase it. Thus the habit of studiousness is not increased, but rather harmed and diminished, by an hour's careless or halfhearted study. Acts give increase to habit when considered cumulatively, not individually. Similarly, it is the cumulative effect of drops of steadily falling water that hollows out a stone, not the individual action of each drop.
"Whom do you seek, friend, if you seek not God? Seek him, find him, cleave to him; bind your will to his with bands of steel and you will live always at peace in this life and in the next."
St Alphonsus de Liguori
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"The supreme perfection of man in this life is to be so united to God that all his soul with all its faculties and powers are so gathered into the Lord God that he becomes one spirit with him, and remembers nothing except God, is aware of and recognises nothing but God, but with all his desires unified by the joy of love, he rests contentedly in the enjoyment of his Maker alone."
St Albert the Great
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"Obedience is the true holocaust which we sacrifice to God on the altar of our hearts."
St Philip Neri
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