Page:Sermons for all the Sundays in the year.djvu/46

 live always in great diffidence of ourselves, and full of confidence in God. Second Means. Confidence in God. 5. St. Francis de Sales says, that the mere attention to self- diffidence on account of our own weakness, would only render us pusillanimous, and expose us to great danger of abandoning ourselves to a tepid life, or even to despair. The more we distrust our own strength, the more we should confide in the divine mercy. This is a balance, says the same saint, in which the more the scale of confidence in God is raised, the more the scale of diffidence in ourselves descends. 6. Listen to me, O sinners who have had the misfortune of having hitherto offended God, and of being condemned to hell: if the Devil tells you that but little hope remains of your eternal salvation, answer him in the words of the Scripture: ”No one hath hoped in the Lord, and hath been confounded. ” (Eccl. ii. 11.) No sinner has ever trusted in God, and has been lost. Make, then, a firm purpose to sin no more; abandon yourselves into the arms of the divine goodness; and rest assured that God will have mercy on you, and save you from Hell. ”Cast thy care upon the Lord, and he shall sustain thee." (Ps. liv. 23.) The Lord, as we read in Blosius, one day said to St. Gertrude: ”He who confides in me, does me such violence that I cannot but hear all his petitions” 7. ”But," says the Prophet Isaias, ”they that hope in the Lord shall renew their strength; they shall take wings as eagles; they shall run, and not be weary; they shall walk, and not faint." (xl. 31.) They who place their confidence in God shall renew their strength; they shall lay aside their own weakness, and shall acquire the strength of God; they shall fly like eagles in the way of the Lord, without fatigue and without ever failing. David says, that”mercy shall encompass him that hopeth in the Lord." (Ps. xxxi. 10.) He that hopes in the Lord shall be encompassed by his mercy, so that he shall never be abandoned by it. 8. St. Cyprian says, that the divine mercy is an inexhaustible fountain. They who bring vessels of the