1. The writer of these instructions makes no pretension to have derived them from his own wisdom. The material was furnished him by the greatest saints and the most eminent doctors of the Church. You can therefore believe in them with great confidence, follow them without fear and adopt them as a safe and reliable guide in your spiritual life.
2. If you try to regulate your practice by making personal and indiscriminate application of everything you find in sermons and books you will never be at rest. One draws you to the right, the other to the left, says Saint Francis de Sales: doctrine is one, but its applications are many, and they vary according to time, place and person. Besides, those who speak to a hardened multitude, from whom they cannot get even a little without exacting a great deal, insist vehemently upon the subject with which they wish to impress their hearers and for the time being appear to forget everything else. If they preach on mortification of the senses, fasting, or any other penitential work, they fail to explain the proper manner of practising it, the limits that should not usually be exceeded and the circumstances under which we can and should refrain from it. This is due to the fact that the cowardly and the lukewarm, whom it is more necessary to excite than to restrain, will take from these instructions only just what is suitable for them. Now as these form the majority, it is for them above all that it is necessary to speak.
3. It would then be better for you individually, without lessening your respect and esteem for books of devotion and for preachers animated by the spirit of God, to confine yourself as far as practice is concerned to the advice of your director and to the teachings of the saints as presented in this little volume.
4. Recall what has been already said, that Saint Francis de Sales counsels you to select your spiritual guide from among ten thousand, and to allow yourself subsequently to be entirely directed by him as though he were an angel come down from heaven to conduct you there.
5. Without this rule of firm and confident obedience, books and sermons and all that is said and written for the multitude, will become for you a source of fatiguing inquietude, and of doubts and fears, owing to the fact that you will try to assimilate things which were not intended for you.
6. Remember, moreover, the pleasant saying of Saint Philip de Neri,—namely, that he had a special predilection for those books the authors of which had a name beginning with the letter S.; that is to say, the works of the saints, because he supposed them to be more illumined by heavenly wisdom.
Now, in observing these instructions you will have for guide and director not the poor sinner who has compiled them for the glory of God and the good of souls, but Saint Augustine, Saint Thomas, Saint Philip de Neri and especially Saint Francis de Sales, in whom the Church recognizes and admires such exalted sanctity, profound wisdom, and rare experience in the direction of souls. These are the three eminent qualities requisite to constitute a great doctor in the Catholic Church, and to form the safest and the most enlightened guide for those who wish to be his disciples.
ADDITIONS.
FINAL ADVICE IN REGARD TO HOLY COMMUNION.
A cause of frequent error and trouble, particularly in regard to Holy Communion, is that feelings are confused with acts of the will. The faculty of willing is the only one we possess as our own, the only one we can use freely and at all times. Hence it follows that it is by the will alone that we can in reality acquire merit or commit sin. The natural virtues are gratuitous gifts of God. The world is right in esteeming them for they come from Him, but it errs when it esteems them exclusively for they do not of themselves give us any title to heaven. God has placed them at the disposal of our will as means to an end, and we can make a good or bad use of them just as we can of all God’s other gifts. We may be deprived of these natural virtues and live by the will alone, spiritually dry and devoid of sentiment, and yet in a state of intimate union with God.
This explanation is intended to reassure such persons as are disposed to feel anxious when they find nothing in their hearts to correspond with the effusions of sensible love with which books of devotion abound in the preparation for Holy Communion. These usually make the mistake of taking for granted the invariable existence of sentiment, and of addressing it exclusively. How many souls do we not see who in consequence grow alarmed about their condition, believing they are devoid of grace notwithstanding their firm will to shun sin and to please God! They should, however, not give way to anxiety, nor exhaust themselves by vain efforts to excite in their hearts a sensibility that God has not given them. When He has granted us this gift we owe Him homage for it as for all others; but God only requires that each of His creatures should render an account of what he has received, and free-will is the one thing that has been accorded indiscriminately to all men. Thus we find Saint Francis de Sales, who possessed in such a high degree sensible love of God and all the natural virtues, making this positive declaration: “The greatest proof we can have in this life that we are in the grace of God, is not sensible love of Him, but the firm resolution never to consent to any sin great or small.”