That which perfect abandonment asks is that we observe in our desires the order of God’s designs. God created all things for His glory first; and secondly, but inseparably, for our happiness. Let us do as He does: let us never separate the interest of His glory from that of our happiness, but let us always make the second subordinate to the first. Let us love God as the object of our beatitude, but let us love Him above all for His infinite goodness. Let us desire and hope for our eternal happiness; but since this happiness, when we shall enjoy it, must result from the love of God for Himself, let us begin now to seek it as it must be when we realize it, and refer the desire of it, as we will one day refer its enjoyment, to the glory of this great God who desires to be all in all things. Thus, at one and the same time, we can practise charity and hope, seek the glory of God and our own happiness, fill the designs of our Creator, and satisfy the deepest and most imperative needs of our nature. The saints did not do otherwise; and Father Caussade, in one of his letters, proves very clearly that the formulas of apparent despair that they have sometimes used in the transports of their cruel sufferings contained in reality acts of the most meritorious confidence. Elsewhere he also shows most perfectly how ill-founded is this even hypothetic separation between God’s interests and our true interests; and he justly concludes therefrom that perfection cannot consist in supposing this separation and sacrificing the interest of our eternal happiness to that of the divine glory. II. We have no reason, therefore, to fear that in reading Father Caussade’s treatise we are liable to confound, at least in this respect, the abandonment he recommends with the Quietism condemned in Fénelon. Is our author equally irreproachable in all the other points of his doctrine? Might he not be accused of turning his readers from duties which require labor and effort to keep them in an indolent repose?