Chapter 34 — Part IV: Prayer — The Lord's Prayer: Introduction and Our Father Who Art in Heaven
Section 14. To imagine that He has forgotten us would be an act of folly and nothing short of a most outrageous insult. God was angry with the Israelites because of the blasphemy they had been guilty of in imagining that they had been abandoned by providence. Thus do we read in Exodus: They tempted the Lord, saying: "Is the Lord amongst us or not?" and in Ezechiel the divine anger is inflamed against the same people for having said: The Lord seeth us not: the Lord hath forsaken the earth. These examples should suffice to deter the faithful from entertaining the criminal notion that God can ever possibly forget mankind. To the same effect we may read in Isaias the complaint uttered by the Israelite. against God; and, on the other hand, the kindly similitude with which God refutes their folly: Sion said: "The Lord hath forsaken me, and the Lord hath forgotten me." To which God answers: Can a woman forget her infant, so as not to have pity on the son of her womb? And if she should forget, yet will not I forget thee. Behold, I have engraven thee in my hands.