You long, O Lover of my soul, to come to me. Your delights are to be with me, cold, inhospitable as I am. Come, then; come, Lord Jesus, and in satisfying Your own desire, enkindle mine. [43] Job vi. [44] John xvi. XI. FAITH. Sola fides sufficit! What mainly hinders the freedom and happiness of our intercourse with Christ our Lord in the Blessed Sacrament is the account we make _of feelings_. In spite of all that can be said to us, we persist in applying this untrustworthy test to our relations with God, the result being discouragement and all its evil consequences. Feelings are wayward children, all the more refractory often for blandishments and coaxing. Our wisest plan is not to notice them overmuch; to be glad certainly when they show themselves friendly, and when they are unpropitious to let them alone. Feelings we may dispense with, but faith never. Faith we must follow, lean upon, cling to, with all the more tenacity as the days draw on of which our Lord said: “The Son of man when He cometh, shall He find, think you, faith on earth?”[45] With the vehemence that will take no refusal we must constrain her, saying: “Stay with us, because it is towards evening”.[46] Where faith enters and takes full possession, all good things enter with her. We need not go about to seek anxiously for anything else: _Sola fides sufficit!_ * * * * * Give me, my God, a deep and lively faith in all Your Holy Spirit has revealed and Your Church teaches. Give me this one thing necessary, and it is enough for me. _Sola fides sufficit!_ The faith I ask is a living faith that must needs prove its vitality by good works. Give me the faith that lit up the lives of Your saints. Strengthen my hold on all revealed truth. But give me above all an intense, ever-growing realisation of the mystery of the altar, the central Mystery of our faith. Realised by me as it was by Your saints, what a change that Presence would make in my life! Mind, heart, imagination, will, views, aims, desires directed to it, absorbed by it--O Jesus, what a transformation this would be! _Sola fides sufficit!_ Lord, increase my faith! Thou Who of old didst love Thy hand to lay On the dull, vacant eyes that craved for light, Behold, I come to Thee, and crying, pray: O Christ, O Son of David, give me sight! A faith scarce clouded by the mists of earth, A faith that pierceth heaven I ask of Thee, Faith to prize all things by their lasting worth: Thou canst, Thou wilt--O Lord, that I may see!