life, and have left unmultiplied the money of the
Master.(92) There is plainly no middle course for us, if we would not
encounter disaster; we are not negative as to the necessities of our
nature; it is not enough for us to turn from positive harm, from the
objects that deceive and disappoint us; we must further turn to positive
good, and to Him who alone can quiet and appease our yearning spirits.

One of the most evident and convincing reasons, then, why we should put
our trust in God above all else is that He alone can satisfy and give us
rest. Only God is able adequately to respond to all the needs of our
being. The simplest process of reasoning should assure us of this, when
once we perceive the vastness of our wants and the impossibility of their
satisfaction through the medium of created things. We know our nature,
which has come from the source and essence of truth, cannot be false.
Neither can our unlimited capacities for knowledge, for joy, for happiness
be a deceiving mockery. There is a way to peace for us, and a source of
supreme contentment; there is a fountain of living waters from which, if
we drink, we shall never thirst again. Hence our Saviour said: "Come to me
all you that labour and are burdened, and I will refresh you;"(93) and
again, "he that shall drink of the water that I will give him shall not
thirst forever: but the water that I will give him shall become in him a
fountain of water, springing up into life everlasting."(94)

But we shall never be able to come to God, we shall never succeed even in
getting near the secret of interior peace and contentment until we are
able to grasp more or less comprehensively the great basic truths of our
existence: that God loves each one of us with the love of an infinite
Father, and that His Providence is so universal and omnipotent as to
extend to all things, even to the numbering of the hairs of our head. We
talk much about chance and fortune and accident, we speak every day of
things happening, as if by the sheerest contingence, without warning or
previous knowledge; and so it is with reference to ourselves, and to all
the world perhaps: but with reference to divine Providence it is not so;
there is nothing accidental, nothing unforeseen with respect to God.
"Without Thy counsel and Providence, and without cause, nothing cometh to
pass in the earth,"(95) says the Imitation. But what does this mean, "God
provides?" It means that the will of the omnipotent