Peace of soul is a supremely desirable possession, not alone because of the sweetness it contains, but also and much more on account of the strength it imparts, and the favorable conditions in which it places us.  It is almost indispensable to one who proposes to live an interior life.  So, in Sacred Scripture the Lord wills to be the God of peace.  Our Sweet Savior, at His birth, caused the angels to sing, “Glory to God in the Highest, and on earth peace to people of good will.”  Very often, when He showed Himself to His disciples after His Resurrection.  He addressed them with the touching salutation: “Peace be with you.”  His apostles adopted the same practice at the beginning of their Epistles.  And the Holy Spirit Himself invites us to “seek after peace and pursue it”. 

But if there is a good peace, there is also an evil peace.  The true peace is the tranquility of right order.  To attain it, we must have order in our thoughts, in our affections, in our volitions, in our actions and sufferings.  That is to say, our wills must always be submissive to the will of God by obedience and resignation. Otherwise there shall be disorder and the opposite of peace.  For “who hath resisted the Lord and hath peace?”, namely holy peace.

False peace is the tranquility found in lukewarmness or sin.  “There is no peace to the wicked, saith the Lord”: no true peace. God shows great mercy to sinners when he torments them with the stings of remorse in order to arouse them from the fatal lethargy.  Their worst misfortune would be to remain tranquil in their sins.  The same, with due proportion, can be said to the tepid soul.  She can never enjoy true and profound peace; for her will is not altogether a good will and is dragged in opposite directions by too many unmortified passions.  Should she make herself easy in such state, it would be an alarming sign: it would mean that she is beginning to be affected with spiritual blindness, that her heart is growing hard and her conscience drowsy. –Abbot Vitals Lehodey “Holy Abandonment’