“God orders a series of events that detach us gradually from the world first, and finally from the self also. The operation is painful, but our corruption makes it needful. If the flesh were healthy, the surgeon would not need to probe it. He uses the knife only in proportion to the depth of the wound and the extent of the proud flesh. If we feel his operation too keenly, it is because the disease is active. Is it cruelty that makes the surgeon probe us to the quick? No, far otherwise-it is skill and kindness; he would do the same with his only child. . . . He must tear from us what we love wrongly, unreasonably, or excessively, the thing that hinders his love. In so doing, he causes us to cry out like a child from whom one takes away a knife with which it could injure or kill itself. . . . God afflicts us only for our correction. Even when he seems to overwhelm us, it is for our own good, to spare us the greater evil we would do to ourselves. The things for which we weep could have caused us eternal distress. That which we count as loss was then indeed most lost when we fancied that it belonged to us. . . . God deprives us of the things we prize only because he wants to teach us to love them purely, truly, and properly in order to enjoy them forever in his presence, and because he wants to do a hundred times better for us than we can even desire for ourselves.”
In The Complete Fenelon (15-16).