How Can We Know Our Sins Are Forgiven?

Your grand and splendid explanation of a teaching new to us has opened up a harder road to the most glorious renunciation. It has taken the scales from our eyes and shown us its summit raised to the heavens. But in the same measure we are cast down by a heavier weight of despair. For when we measure its vastness against our puny strength, and compare the utterly lowly state of our ignorance with the boundless height of virtue shown to us, we feel ourselves so small that we not only cannot reach it, but are sure to fall short even in what we have. For weighed down by the burden of excessive despair, we somehow fall away from the lowest depths to depths lower still. So there is one support, and only one, that can bring a cure for our wounds: to learn something about the end of penitence, and especially about the signs that amends have been made. Then we may feel sure of the forgiveness of past sins, and so be spurred on to climb the heights of the perfection described above. [a]