Love Quote by Alphonsus Liguori

“Greatest possible love and confidence” is a daring pairing in a religious culture that often trained the conscience to flinch. Liguori, a Catholic priest and moral theologian, is writing against a familiar spiritual reflex: the anxious believer who approaches God like a judge’s bench, not a hearth. The line doesn’t beg for more devotion; it prescribes a posture. “Practice” makes trust a discipline, not a mood, and “treating with Him” frames prayer as an ongoing relationship with a person, not a one-way plea to an institution.

The specific intent is pastoral triage. Liguori is famous for softening the harsher edges of moral rigorism in his era, arguing that scrupulous fear can become its own vanity: a fixation on the self’s failure that masquerades as humility. This sentence quietly rewires the transaction. If you lead with confidence, you’re less likely to turn religion into an accounting system of penalties and loopholes. If you lead with love, confidence doesn’t curdle into entitlement.

The subtext is that God’s power is not the primary fact a believer should feel. God’s availability is. Liguori isn’t denying sin; he’s denying that fear is the most honest response to it. In the context of 17th- and 18th-century Catholic devotion, where confession, examination of conscience, and moral casuistry could produce spirals of doubt, this is a rhetorical rescue line: treat God as someone who wants you close, not someone you must carefully manage.