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Roman Catechism
Duties We Owe Our Heavenly Father
These points having been explained, the faithful should be reminded of all they owe in return to God, their most loving Father, so that they may be aware of the extent of the love, piety, obedience and respect they are bound to render to Him who has created them, who watches over them, and who has redeemed them; and with what hope and trust they should invoke Him.
But to enlighten the ignorant and to correct the false ideas of such as imagine prosperity and success in life to be the only test that God preserves and maintains His love towards us, and that the adversities and trials which come from His hand are a sign that He is not well disposed towards us and that He entertains hostile dispositions towards us, it will be necessary to point out that even if the hand of the Lord sometimes presses heavily upon us, it is by no means because He is hostile to us, but that by striking us He heals us, and that the wounds coming from God are remedies.
He chastises sinners so as to improve them by this lesson, and inflicts temporal punishments in order to deliver them from eternal torments. For though He visits our iniquities with a rod and our sins with stripes, yet his mercy he will not take away from us.
The faithful, therefore, should be recommended to recognise in such chastisements the fatherly love of God, and ever to have in their hearts and on their lips the saying of Job, the most patient of men: He woundeth and cureth; he striketh and his hands shall heal; as well as to repeat frequently the words written by Jeremias in the name of the people of Israel: Thou hast chastised me and I was instructed, as a young bullock unaccustomed to the yoke: convert me and I shall be converted; for thou art the Lord my God; and to keep before their eyes the example of Tobias who, recognising in the loss of his sight the paternal hand of God raised against him, cried out: I bless thee, O Lord God of Israel, because thou hast chastised me and thou hast saved me.
In this connection the faithful should be particularly on their guard against believing that any calamity or affliction that befalls them can take place without the knowledge of God; for we have His own words: A hair of your heads shall not perish. Let them rather find consolation in that divine oracle read in the Apocalypse: Those whom I love I rebuke and chastise; and let them find comfort in the exhortation addressed by St. Paul to the Hebrews: My son, neglect not the discipline of the Lord; neither be thou weaned whilst thou art rebuked by him: for whom the Lord loveth he chastiseth, and he scourgeth every son whom he receiveth.... But if you be for instructors, and we reverenced them, shall we not much more obey the Father of spirits and live?