This quote is harsh, yet essential.  It applies to myself, to all pursuing the contemplative path.  It must not be applied to others, rather within myself the purging must center.

The pursuit of the good is not true charity when we pursue it with an unholy intention, or even when we pursue it for its own sake.  Divine charity does undoubtedly will the good but only for God’s sake.  What discouragements, what jealousies, what pettiness do we not witness among those who are more attached to the good than to the will of God!  Their efforts in well-doing often miscarry and they are disappointed and depressed.  They observe others participating in their enterprises and they grow jealous.  In order to succeed in their undertakings, they do not scruple to discredit or to oppose their collaborators in the same grand work, the work of redemption of immortal souls.  They just love themselves and prefer the human good to the divine.  They pretend to be going towards Jesus Christ, but they make an easy and often devious detour which brings them back to themselves.  They do not know how wide a difference there is between the man devoted to good and the man of God.  How many workers, brilliant in outward show, remain barren in results, because the love of self, rather than the love of God, has had the chief influence in forming and inspiring them?  –Abbot Vital Lehodey ‘The Way That Leads To God’.