Means necessary for salvation
“I am the voice of one crying in the wilderness: Make straight the way of the Lord.”—John 1:23
All would wish to be saved and to enjoy the glory of Paradise; but to reach Heaven we must walk the straight road that leads there. This straight road is the observance of the divine commands. And so the Baptist preached: “Make straight the way of the Lord.” But if we are to walk always in this way of the Lord, without turning to the right or to the left, we must take the proper means.
These means are: first, distrust of ourselves; second, confidence in God; third, resistance to temptations.
First Means.—Distrust of ourselves.
1. “With fear and trembling,” says the Apostle, “work out your salvation” (Phil. 2:12). To gain eternal life we must always be afraid, indeed must tremble for ourselves (with fear and trembling), distrusting our own strength entirely; for without the divine grace we can do nothing. “Without me,” says Jesus Christ, “you can do nothing.” We can do nothing for the salvation of our souls. St. Paul tells us that of ourselves we are not capable even of a good thought: “Not that we are sufficient to think anything of ourselves, as of ourselves, but our sufficiency is from God” (2 Cor. 3:5). Without the help of the Holy Ghost we cannot even pronounce the name of Jesus so as to merit by it: “And no one can say the Lord Jesus, but by the Holy Ghost” (1 Cor. 12:3).
2. Wretched is the man who trusts himself in the way of God. St. Peter felt the sad effects of this self-confidence. When Jesus Christ foretold that on that very night he would deny him—“In this night, before cock crow, thou wilt deny me thrice” (Matt. 26:34)—Peter, trusting in his own strength and his good will, replied: “Yea, though I should die with thee, I will not deny thee” (v. 35). But what came of it?
On the night after Jesus Christ had been taken, Peter found himself in the court of Caiphas; and no sooner was he reproached there with being one of the disciples of the Savior than, seized with fear, he thrice denied his Master, swearing that he had never known him. So necessary is it for us to be humble and to distrust ourselves, that God is content rather to permit us at times to fall into some sin, so that by our fall we may gain this humility and a knowledge of our own weakness. This befell David too; and so, after his sin, he confessed: “Before I was humbled, I offended” (Ps. 119:67).
3. And so the Holy Ghost calls blessed the man who is always in fear: “Blessed is the man who is always fearful” (Prov. 28:14). He who is afraid of falling distrusts his own strength, flees as far as he can from dangerous occasions, commends himself often to God, and so keeps his soul free from sin. But the man who has no fear and trusts in himself easily exposes himself to the danger of falling; he seldom commends himself to God, and so he falls.
Let us imagine someone on the summit of a mountain, suspended over a great precipice by a cord held by another. Seeing himself in such danger, surely he would do nothing but plead with the one who holds the cord: Hold fast, hold fast, for God’s sake, do not let go. So stands each one of us, in danger of falling into the abyss of every crime, if God does not hold us up with his hand. We should therefore beg him continually not to take his hands from over us, and to help us in all our dangers.
4. Every morning, on rising, St. Philip Neri used to say to God: Lord, keep your hands this day over Philip; for if you do not, Philip will betray you. And one day, as we are told in his life, walking through the city of Rome and considering his own misery, he kept saying, I despair, I despair. A certain religious who heard him, thinking he was truly tempted to despair, corrected him and urged him to hope in the divine goodness. But the saint answered: “I despair of myself, but I trust in God.” And so we too must pass through this life, in which we meet so many dangers of losing God, living always in distrust of ourselves, but with confidence in God.
Second Means.—Confidence in God.
5. St. Francis de Sales writes that if we were to attend only to distrusting ourselves, looking solely at our own weakness, this would serve only to make us faint-hearted, with great danger of abandoning ourselves to a relaxed life, or even to despair. The more we distrust our own strength, the more we must confide in the divine mercy. This is a balance, says the same saint, in which the more the scale of confidence in God rises, the more the scale of distrust of ourselves descends.
6. Listen to me, sinners, who to your misfortune have until now offended God and have deserved to be condemned to hell: if the Devil tells you that little hope remains for your eternal salvation, answer him with the words of Scripture: “No one hath hoped in the Lord, and hath been confounded” (Ecclus. 2:10). No sinner has ever trusted in God and been lost. So make a firm resolution to sin no more; cast yourselves into the arms of the divine goodness; and do not doubt that God will have mercy on you and save you from Hell. “Cast thy care upon the Lord, and he shall sustain thee” (Ps. 55:22). One day, as Blosius relates, the Lord said to St. Gertrude: “He who confides in me does me such violence that I cannot but grant all that he asks of me.”
7. The Prophet Isaiah says: “They that hope in the Lord shall renew their strength; they shall take wings as eagles; they shall run, and not be weary; they shall walk, and not faint” (Isa. 40:31). They who place their confidence in God shall renew their strength; they shall lay aside their own weakness and acquire the strength of God; they shall fly like eagles in the way of the Lord, without growing weary and without ever failing. David says further that “mercy shall encompass him that hopeth in the Lord” (Ps. 32:10). He that hopes in the Lord shall be so encompassed by his mercy that he can never be abandoned by it.
8. St. Cyprian says that the divine mercy is a fountain of infinite greatness: he who brings to it a larger vessel of confidence carries away the more graces. And so the Royal Prophet said: “Let thy mercy, Lord, be upon us, as we have hoped in thee” (Ps. 33:22). Whenever the Devil frightens us by setting before our eyes the great difficulty of persevering in the grace of God amid all the occasions and dangers of this life, let us, without answering him, raise our eyes to God and hope in his goodness, that he will certainly send us the help to resist every assault: “I have lifted up my eyes to the mountains, from whence help shall come to me” (Ps. 121:1). And when the enemy represents to us our weakness, let us say with the Apostle: “I can do all in him who strengtheneth me” (Phil. 4:13). Of myself I can do nothing; but I trust in God that by his grace I shall be able to do all things.
9. And so, amid the many dangers of perdition in which we find ourselves, we should turn continually to Jesus Christ, casting ourselves into the hands of him who redeemed us by his death, and saying to him: “Into thy hands I commend my spirit: thou hast redeemed me, O Lord, the God of truth” (Ps. 31:5). And as we say this, we should keep a great confidence of reaching eternal life, adding: “In thee, O Lord, I have hoped; let me not be confounded forever” (Ps. 31:1).
10. It is very true that when in dangerous occasions we have recourse to God with confidence, he helps us; but sometimes, in certain more pressing occasions, the Lord wishes us to do our part as well, doing violence to ourselves to resist. Then it will not be enough to have recourse to God once or twice; it will be necessary to multiply our prayers, going again and again to sigh before the image of the Blessed Virgin and at the feet of the crucifix, crying out with tears: Mary, my mother, help me; Jesus, my Savior, save me; for pity’s sake, do not abandon me, do not let me lose you.
Third Means.—Resistance to temptations.
11. Let us keep in mind the words of the Gospel: “How narrow is the gate, and strait is the way that leadeth to life: and few there are that find it” (Matt. 7:14). The way to Heaven is narrow; the carriage does not pass that way, as the saying goes. He who wishes to go there in a carriage will not be able to enter; and so few reach Heaven, because few are willing to force themselves to resist temptations. “The kingdom of Heaven suffereth violence, and the violent bear it away” (Matt. 11:12). The kingdom of Heaven suffers violence, explains one writer: Vi quaeritur, invaditur, occupatur—it must be sought and seized by doing violence to oneself; he who wishes to win it without trouble, by leading a loose and soft life, will not win it, but will be shut out from it.
12. To save their souls, the saints went—some to live in a cloister, some to bury themselves in a cave, some to embrace torments and death, as the holy martyrs did. “The violent bear it away.” Some complain that they have no confidence in God; but they do not perceive that their lack of confidence springs from their weak resolution to serve God. St. Teresa used to say: “The Devil has no fear of irresolute souls.” And the Wise Man wrote that “desires kill the slothful” (Prov. 21:25).
Some would wish to be saved, would wish to become saints, but never resolve to take the means—meditation, the frequent use of the sacraments, detachment from creatures; or else they take them up and lay them down. In a word, they feed on fruitless desires, and meanwhile go on living out of the grace of God, or at least in their tepidity, which in the end leads them to lose God; and so in them is verified the saying, “desires kill the slothful.”
13. If, then, we wish to save our souls and become saints, we must make a strong resolution, not only in general to give ourselves to God, but also in particular to take the proper means, and, once we have taken them up, never to lay them down. We must therefore never cease to pray to Jesus Christ and to his holy Mother for holy perseverance.
Points for Reflection
1. “He who is afraid of falling distrusts his own strength, flees as far as he can from dangerous occasions, commends himself often to God, and so keeps his soul free from sin” (§3)
2. “The more we distrust our own strength, the more we must confide in the divine mercy” (§5)
3. “We must make a strong resolution, not only in general to give ourselves to God, but also in particular to take the proper means, and, once we have taken them up, never to lay them down” (§13)