needful for the spiritual life and for the entire mastery over self, is unbounded, if we with trustfulness fly for refuge to His arms.
For if our Divine Shepherd for thirty-three years followed after His lost sheep, with cries so piercing that His voice grew hoarse, through a road so rough and thorny that He shed all His blood upon it, and laid down His life, will He not now—when the poor sheep follows Him by obeying His commands, or at least with the desire of doing so (though sometimes feeble), when it calls upon Him and entreats Him, will He not now cast upon it the life-giving glance of His Countenance, hear its cry, lay it upon His Divine Shoulders, rejoicing with all His neighbours and with the Angels of Heaven?
For if our Lord in His love spared no pains in order to find the blind and dumb sinner, the lost coin of the Gospel, is it possible that He would turn away from one who, like a lost sheep, calls and cries piteously after the shepherd?
And can it be imagined, that God, Who knocks continually at the door of man's heart, that He might enter in and sup there, and communicate His gifts, would, when invited by man to enter into that heart, turn a deaf ear, and refuse to come in?
The third way of gaining this holy confidence in God, is to recall the truths of Holy Scripture
