Thus all opposition to the will, the order of God, serves but to render it more adorable. The servers of iniquity are the slaves of justice, and from the ruins of Babylon the divine action builds the heavenly Jerusalem.
APPENDIX.
Our readers will be grateful to us for adding to Father Caussade’s treatise a few methods which facilitate the practice of abandonment. To recommend these methods it suffices to say that their authors are St. Francis de Sales, Saint Jane Frances de Chantal, Bossuet, and Father Surin.
[I.]
A very easy Means of acquiring Peace of Heart.
By Father Surin, S. J.
It seems to me that the multiplicity of methods we employ to acquire and practise virtue is one of the obstacles to our being solidly established therein. Not that I counsel being so irrevocably bound to one method that we are not ready to change when God’s attraction changes. But, after all, this attraction at bottom never changes, and only presents itself under a more spiritual form. They who will be faithful to the following rules will have no difficulty in practising the virtues appropriate to the circumstances, the time, and the place in which they find themselves, and in relishing in the exercise of these virtues the peace and holy liberty of the children of God.
1st. Let us be fully convinced that we have but one thing to do: to possess each moment the fulness of our mind, without permitting the reasonable will to uselessly recall the past or excite vain anxieties concerning the future.
True abandonment, which makes God look upon us with love, consists in leaving the past to His ever merciful justice, and in confiding the future to His fatherly Providence. The remembrance of our past infidelities should humble but not trouble us, though we were convinced that they are much more serious than they appear.