True, we must not, while living idle from sloth or levity, expect God to sustain us. Nor must we expect God to repair by a miracle the damage our unreasonableness and our omissions have inflicted upon us.

Yet, should God excite in us an earnest desire to devote ourselves to some high task, we should follow this call unhampered by any worry about the outward necessities of life and be fully confident that God will take care of what we had to pretermit for the sake of a higher object. The spendthrift who dissipates everything he has for the sake of momentary pleasures must not expect God to dispense him from the consequences of his defects. The generous character, on the other hand, who would give a beggar one half of his cloak as St. Martin did, may confidently speak: “God will provide” (Gen. 22:8). He who has vowed holy poverty shall indeed believe that God, who sent a raven to feed St. Benedict in the hermitage of Subiaco, will provide food and shelter for him.

Or again, if God—without any guilty negligence on our part—imposes the burden of poverty on us, we should not waste ourselves away with care nor feel as though the bottom of our existence had been knocked out; rather—while sparing no effort to provide for our livelihood—we should preserve a deep confidence that God will assist us. We should, in such a case, seek to comprehend the particular call of God to us that lies in this visitation, not allow ourselves to be submerged by our concern for outward necessities. The fact that we have lost the secure natural basis of our outward existence should impel us to throw ourselves entirely upon God’s mercy; notwithstanding all reasonable endeavors to cope with the situation on the natural level, we should firmly resist the tendency to lose heart or to become wholly absorbed in our worries.

Above all, we must always preserve, by our trust in God, our inner freedom to care about the one thing necessary, mindful of the words of the Lord: “Seek ye first the kingdom of God and his justice: and all these things shall be added unto you” (Matt. 6:33).

Fear is the opposite of confidence in God

There is, further, one current attitude specifically opposed to confidence in God—fear; or, to put it more exactly, the state of the soul abandoning itself to distress and anxiety. There are many things which on the purely natural level are apt to frighten us—grave diseases, for instance, the hostility of wicked and powerful men, the turmoil of battle, the uncontrolled fury of a mob, and last but not least, death itself.