It may reasonably be expected that, since you desire happiness and your own true and lasting welfare, you will choose and follow after what will give you the most solid, refined, and lasting happiness, and abandon whatever is inconsistent with it and opposed to your real well-being. True piety is a source of such happiness. That piety which some think will put an end to all enjoyment, and therefore keep at a distance from; that Christianity which some may tell you makes men unbearably precise and strict, and dead to all life's enjoyments, will give you a happiness more pure, noble, and lasting than all this world can find for you. Religion not only proposes to us future blessedness beyond the conception of any one, but gives present happiness beyond what they know who are strangers to it. The happiness of being at peace with God, through our Lord Jesus Christ, of a quiet, approving conscience through the conflicts and trials of daily life; communion with God the Heavenly Father; the graces which God the Holy Ghost forms and nourishes in the soul, such as faith, patience, hope, love, gentleness, kindness: these are part of the present enjoyments of true piety. As it is written, that eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, neither hath it entered into the heart of man, what things God hath prepared for them that love Him. If these words are true as to this life, much more as to the life to come. Hesitate not, delay not, to secure for yourselves that peace of God which surpasseth all understanding. Jesus will give it you if you honestly and heartily ask Him.
- text taken from Daily Bread - Bring a Few Morning Meditations for the Use of Catholic Christians by Father Richard Waldo Sibthorp