Maturity - KKG

If it happened that the father, even the most loving and solicitous father, at the very moment he wanted to do the best for his child, did the worst, did the worst that may have disturbed the child's entire life - should the son, if he remember the circumstances, therefore drown his piety in the oblivious on indifference or change it into wrath?

Well, let shabby souls who are able to love God and people only when everything is going their way, let them hate and defy in ill temper - a faithful son loves, unchanged. It is always a sign of a mediocre person if he, when he in convinced that the one who made him unhappy did it for the purpose of doing the best for him, can be separated from him in wrath and bitterness.

It is the same with Christianity. Although it has made him unhappy, he does not therefore give it up, because it never occurs to him that Christianity would have entered the world in order to harm human beings; he continually retains respect for it. He does not abandon it, and even if he sighs despondently, "Would that I had never been brought up in this doctrine," he does not abandon it. And the despondency becomes sadness, that it must indeed be almost grievous for Christianity that such a thing could happen - but he does not abandon it. In the end, Christianity must certainly make it up to him. In the end, indeed, it is not little by little; It is much less and yet infinitely much more.

But only slovenly souls abandon what once made an absolute impression on them, and only contemptible souls despicably exploit their own sufferings by making from it the wretched profit of being able to disturb others, of becoming self-important by the most dastardly of all arrogation: wanting to bar others from finding comfort because one has not found it oneself.