Annual Retreat Exercise #14: Conclusion of these exercises
2 min • Digitized on October 28, 2021
From Introduction to the Devout Life, page 281
By St. Francis de Sales
After these affections you must consider the particular means necessary to maintain your dear resolutions, and determine to be faithful in making good use of them: such as frequent prayer, the sacraments, good works, the amendment of your faults, discovered in the examination, lessening the occasions of evil, and following the advice which may be given you for this purpose.
Afterwards, by way of recruiting your strength, make a thousand protestations that you will persevere in your resolutions; and, as if you held your heart, soul, and will in your hands, dedicate, consecrate, sacrifice, and immolate them to God, protesting never to take them back again, but leave them in the hands of his Divine Majesty, in order to follow, on all occasions, his holy ordinances.
Pray to God to renovate you entirely, and that He would give you his blessing, and strengthen this your protestation. Invoke the Blessed Virgin, your patron St. N. N., &c.
In this disposition of heart, go to your spiritual father, and accuse yourself of the principal faults which you may have remarked since your general confession, and receiving absolution in the same manner as the first time, pronounce and sign your protestation before him; and in conclusion, unite your renewed heart to its first principle, your Saviour, in the most holy sacrament of the Eucharist.