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The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from The Varieties of Religious Experience by William James: life, in this promise, in the only sense in which it answered the
needs of my soul, in that, namely, of a real external
supernatural action, capable of giving me thoughts, and taking
them away from me, and exerted on me by a God as truly master of
my heart as he is of the rest of nature. Renouncing then all
merit, all strength, abandoning all my personal resources, and
acknowledging no other title to his mercy than my own utter
misery, I went home and threw myself on my knees and prayed as I
never yet prayed in my life. From this day onwards a new
interior life began for me: not that my melancholy had
disappeared, but it had lost its sting. Hope had entered into my
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