‘These words raise our hopes.’1 There is one brief sentence in the Compendium of Theology that not only reveals a core conviction of Aquinas but also alerts us to the fundamental character of his spirituality. He writes: ‘The confidence a human being has in God ought to be most certain.’2 Confidence—that is the word, the key word, which more than any other in Aquinas’s writing gives us access to his understanding of the Our Father, and indeed to his understanding of prayer in general.