It is not merely the goodness and love of God that should furnish us with a continual spring of hope, but the goodness and love that we ourselves have personally experienced from Him. How good God has been to me! When I look back upon my past life, I find a thousand practical proofs of His love. It would be mean and ungrateful not to acknowledge them. Now if He has been so good to me in the past, I have every reason to expect that He will continue the same to me in the future, Jesus Christ the same yesterday, today, and for evermore. Why should I fear with such guarantees of His abiding love?
Besides this, the very sense of my own nothingness and worthlessness ought to give me fresh hope. If God has, with such materials to work upon, produced one who at least desires to be faithful to Him and pleasing in His sight, I have strong ground for confidence that He will continue His work of mercy. He means to perfect the work already done in me. The wonders that He has wrought hitherto will assuredly go on as long as life shall last.
What, moreover, is God's object in all the trouble that He has taken with me? It is to secure my presence in heaven. It is wonderful, but nevertheless it is certain that He intends that even I shall be an ornament of the celestial courts. If I suffer now, the painful process is but the necessary polishing which is to make the shapeless bit of stone into an object beautiful in the sight of the angels. In God therefore I will hope, now and always.
- text from Beautiful Pearls of Catholic Truth; it has the Imprimatur of Archbishop Michael Augustine Corrigan, Diocese of New York, 6 October 1897