bluntness of perception of those around you. You often say, in the
bitterness of your heart, Any other trial but this I could have borne;
every other chastisement would have been light in comparison. But why
have you so little faith? Why do you not see that it is because all
these petty trials are so severe to you, therefore are they sent? All
these amiable qualities that I have enumerated, and the love which they
win for you, would make you admire and value yourself too much, unless
your system were reduced, so to speak, by a series of petty but
continued annoyances. As I said before, you must seek to strengthen your
faith by tracing the close connection between these annoyances and the
"needs be" for them. It is probably exactly at the time when you are too
much elated by praise and admiration that you are sent some
counterbalancing annoyance, or perhaps suffered to fall into some fault
of temper which will lessen you in your own eyes, as well as in those of
others. You are often troubled by some annoyance, too, when you have
blamed others for being too easily overcome by an annoyance of the very
same kind. "Stand upon" an anxious "watch," and you will see how
constantly severe judgments of others are punished by falling ourselves
into temptations similar to those which we had treated as light ones
when sitting in judgment upon others. If you would acquire the habit of
exercising faith with respect to the smallest details of your every-day
life, by such faith the light itself might be won, and your eyes be
opened to see how wondrously all things, even those which appear the
most needlessly worrying, are made to work together for your good.[17]
These are, however, but the first lessons in the school of faith, the
first steps on the road which leads to "rest in God."

Severer trials are hastening onward, for which your present petty trials
are serving as a preparatory discipline. According to the manner in
which these are met and supported, will be your patience in the hour of