Yet we must believe in God’s inexhaustible love and mercy

It is in such situations, precisely, that our unconditional trust in God has to assert itself. We must stick unswervingly to the belief that God loves us with an infinite love and wilts our sanctification, whatever our spiritual status may appear to our eyes. He who truly confides in God does not presume to decide himself, by experience, whether God is intent on saving him or has withdrawn from him. Once he has absorbed the message of the Gospels, his conviction of God’s infinite mercy, of God’s inexhaustible love which embraces him also, is so firm and unconditional as to preclude its dependence on any confirmation drawn from experience. He does not arrogate to himself a competence to ascertain from the evidence of facts whether God has turned from him and abandoned him.

On the contrary, he knows that nothing can come from God that is not a manifestation of His love, and that every situation must be a priori considered against this irremovable background. Much as his ever-recurrent backslidings may depress him, he will seek their cause in himself alone, in his own weakness and lack of zeal; and at the same time thank God for the humiliation to which he owes a clear consciousness of his weakness. How could he judge on his own authority what God means thereby to convey to him!

Even in these disappointments, he will humbly look for the traces of God’s love, and abide by the words of St. Paul: “For I know in whom I have believed” (2 Tim. 1:12). Aware of the untiring mercy of God, full of confidence he will again and again begin anew.

Our confidence comes not from our own earthly fortunes, but from “who God is”

For this exactly is the essence of trust that, instead of inferring from the symptoms—from the way we are treated in one respect or another—what a person’s intentions are, we assume them to be good and then interpret the situation in the light of this prime assumption. Suppose I make the acquaintance of a person and from my various experiences concerning him derive a conception of his character and of his emotional attitude to me. Suppose, again, that I arrive at the point of forming the judgment, “I have implicit trust in this person; there is no one I should trust more.”

From this moment onward, I no longer judge that person’s character from his behavior; I no longer proceed, as it were, from the appreciation of his single acts to a comprehension of his nature or his essential position. Rather I proceed, henceforth, in the inverse sense: I interpret all his acts in the light of the definitive concept I have formed of his character.