It is true that charity increases by degrees and goes from perfection to perfection according as by our works or by the frequenting of the sacraments we make place for it, yet it does not decrease by a lessening of its perfection, for we never lose any least part of it but we lose it all. In which it resembles the masterpiece of Phidias so famous amongst the ancients; for they say that this great sculptor made at Athens an ivory statue of Minerva, twenty-six cubits high, and in the buckler which she held, wherein he had represented the battles of the Amazons and Giants, he carved his own face with so great art that one could not take away one line of it, says Aristotle, without destroying the whole statue, so that this work, though it had been brought to perfection by adding piece to piece, yet would have perished in an instant if one little parcel of the workman's likeness had been removed. In like manner, Theotimus, though the Holy Ghost having infused charity into a soul increases it by adding one degree to another and one perfection of love to another, yet still, the resolution of preferring God's will before all things being the essential point of sacred love, and that wherein the image of eternal love, that is of the Holy Ghost, is represented, one cannot withdraw one single piece of it but presently charity wholly perishes.