How One Can Recognize Whether a Person Acts With Non-Reliance Upon Self and Perfect Hope in God

It frequently happens that certain self-reliant people think they have no hope in themselves at all and place all their hope in God, resting their confidence in him alone. But in practice it is not so. They can verify this for themselves by what happens in them and to them after they happen to fall in some way. If, grieving over their fall, reproaching and blaming themselves, they at the same time devise: I will do this and that, the consequences of the fall will be made good, and everything will again go as it should—this is a sure sign that even before their fall they were relying upon themselves and not upon God. And the darker and more comfortless their grief is in this case, the more it reveals that they were trusting too much in themselves and far too little in God: that is why the grief of their fall is not seasoned with any consolation. Whoever does not rely upon himself but hopes in God, when he falls does not wonder excessively at this nor is he overwhelmed by inordinate grief, for he knows that this happened to him certainly on account of his weakness, but even more on account of the weakness of his hope in God. Therefore, following his fall, he intensifies his non-reliance upon himself, and strives still more to deepen and strengthen his humble hope in God; and further, hating the base passions that were the cause of his fall, he bears calmly and peacefully the penitential labors for having offended God, and armed with firm hope in God he pursues his enemies with the greatest courage and resolve, even unto death.

I would like certain persons who think of themselves that they are virtuous and spiritual to reflect on what was said above—persons who, when they fall into some transgression, torment and trouble themselves and find no peace, and who, already worn out by this grief and torment that arise in them from nothing other than self-love, run by that same impulse of self-love to their spiritual father in order to be freed from such a burden. Whereas they ought to have done this immediately after the fall, and done it for no other reason than the desire to wash away the filth of the sin that had offended God, and to receive new strength against themselves, in the Most Holy Mystery of repentance and confession.