The abyss of our faults, the immense distance that still separates us from the perfection which God has set before us as our goal—they may well prompt us to say: “Have mercy on us, O Lord, have mercy on us” (Tob. 8:10); yet they must never cause us to lose heart. Rather we must say, again, with David; “Thou shalt wash me, and I shall be made whiter than snow” (Ps. 50:9); and believe firmly that the mercy of God is greater than all the vastness of our weakness and infidelity.

Certainly, whenever we have offended God by any definite transgression, whenever we have betrayed Christ in any manner, we should be filled with profound contrition. Even then, however, we should not for a moment flee from God, nor yield to the temptation of doubting either His omnipotence or His mercy. What we are to do is to fall down before Him in penitence and to flee into His merciful arms. Such moments precisely are the test of our confidence in God, of the firmness of our faith in God’s mercy, from which no sin can, in statu viae, separate us irrevocably.

It has been noted on an earlier occasion that what brought Judas to perdition was not his betrayal of the Savior but the fact that, shaken with remorse, he despaired of the mercy of God: in other words, that he lacked confidence in God. The deeper our contrition, the brighter and the more steadfast must be our faith in the all-powerfulness and all-mercifulness of God.

Habitual sin sorely tests our confidence in God

Our trust in God is exposed to a particularly hard test if we have to wrestle with a habitual sin. When we again and again relapse into the same fault, when all our moral effort seems ineffective and all our religious zeal fruitless, we shall almost inevitably feel tempted to lose patience, to get discouraged and give up the struggle, or to remonstrate with God; or again, to despair of God’s help and believe ourselves abandoned by Him. The very fact that we have honestly striven to overcome our defect, that we have done so relying on God’s help, that we have been eager to follow His call, and yet encountered defeat, is likely to upset our equilibrium and threatens to throw us into utter confusion.

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