It is obedience, O my God! that leads me to Thy Holy Table: the tender words by which Thou hast invited us would not have sufficed to draw me, for in the troubled state of my soul I cannot be sure they are addressed to me. Misery and infirmity are claims for admission to Thy Feast, but nothing can dispense from the nuptial garment. Therefore when I turn my eyes on myself, after having raised them to Thee, I doubt, I hesitate, I tremble; for if I go from Thee I flee from life, and if I approach unworthily, to my other sins I add the crime of sacrilege.[27] But Thy merciful wisdom, O my God, whilst foreseeing our every need, has foreseen all our weaknesses and has prepared helps for us against both presumption and distrust. For if Thou hast not willed that, certain of Thy grace, we should ever advance with the assurance of the Pharisee and say like him: I come to the altar of the Lord because I know I am just in His eyes: neither hast Thou permitted that a sacrament of love should become for us a torture and an unavoidable snare. I therefore obey, O my God, and in the darkness that envelops me I wish to follow implicitly the guidance of him whom Thou hast appointed to lead me to Thee. I shall approach the Holy Table without wishing for any other warrant than the words spoken by my confessor, or rather by Thee: _You may receive Holy Communion_. I accept, O my God!—be it a well merited punishment or a salutary trial,—this privation of light and sensible devotion, this coldness and distraction, which accompany me even into Thy presence when all the faculties of my soul should be absorbed and confounded in sentiments of adoration and of love. Faith, hope and charity seem to be extinct in my heart, but I know that Thou never withdrawest these virtues when we do not voluntarily renounce them. Act of Faith. Notwithstanding, then, the doubts that cross my mind, _I wish to believe_, O my God! and _I do believe_ all that Thy holy Church has taught me. I have not forgotten that brilliant light of Faith which Thou didst cause to illumine my soul in the days of mercy in order that the precious remembrance of it should serve me as support in the days of trial and temptation. Act of Hope. In spite of these vague fears that seem to extinguish hope within my soul, I know that although Thou art the mighty and strong God before whom the cherubim veil themselves with their wings, the just and all-seeing God who discovers blemishes in the purest souls, still Thou wishest to be in the most Holy Sacrament only the Victim whose Blood effaces the sins of the world; the Good Shepherd who hastens after the strayed sheep and carries it tenderly and unreproachfully back to the fold; the divine Mediator who comes _not to judge but to save_.[28] All this I know, O my God! and therefore _I hope_. Act of Love.