CHAPTER XIV. The Eternal Love of God for us.

CONSIDER the Eternal Love God has borne you, in that, even before our
Lord Jesus Christ became Man and suffered on the Cross for you, His
Divine Majesty designed your existence and loved you. When did He begin
to love you? When He began to be God, and that was never, for He ever
was, without beginning and without end. Even so He always loved you
from eternity, and therefore He made ready all the graces and gifts
with which He has endowed you. He says by His prophet, “I have loved
thee” (and it is YOU that He means) “with an everlasting love,
therefore with lovingkindness have I drawn thee.” [210] And amid these
drawings of His Love He led you to make these resolutions to serve Him.

What must resolutions be which God has foreseen, pondered, dwelt upon
from all eternity? how dear and precious to us! Surely we should be
ready to suffer anything whatsoever rather than let go one particle of
the same. The whole world is not worth one soul, and the soul is worth
but little without its good resolutions.
__________________________________________________________________

[210] Jer. xxxi. 3.
__________________________________________________________________