"If, devout soul, it is your will to please God and live a life of serenity in this world, unite yourself always and in all things to the divine will. Reflect that all the sins of your past wicked life happened because you wandered from the path of God's will. For the future, embrace God's good pleasure and say to him in every happening: "Yea, Father, for so it hath seemed good in thy sight." "

St Alphonsus de Liguori

* * *

"When the devil has failed in making a man fall, he puts forward all his energies to create distrust between the penitent and the confessor, and so by little and little he gains his end at last."

St Philip Neri

* * *

"He who wishes to be perfectly obeyed, should give but few orders."

St Philip Neri

* * *

 

St. Francis de Sales  (1567-1622)
 Bishop, Founder of the Visitation and Doctor of the Church
 
TREATISE ON THE LOVE OF GOD

By St Francis de Sales

Book XII. Containing Certain Counsels For The Progress Of The Soul In Holy Love.

Ch 5. A Very Sweet Example On This Subject.

God is innocent to the innocent,(1) good to the good, cordial to the cordial, tender towards the tender, and his love often makes him do acts of a sacred and holy fondness (mignardise) towards souls who, out of an amorous purity and simplicity, make themselves as little children with him.

Upon a day S. Frances was reciting Our Lady's Office, and, as it commonly happens that if there is but one affair in the whole day, it presses most at time of prayer, this holy lady was called away by her husband for some household matter, and four sundry times thinking to take up again the thread of her Office, she was called from it again, and constrained to interrupt the same verse, till this blessed affair, for which they had so importunately interrupted her prayer, being finished at last, when she returned to her Office she found the verse, so often left by obedience and so often recommenced by devotion, all written in fair golden letters, which her devout companion, Madam Vannocia swore she saw the dear Angel-Guardian of the Saint writing, as S. Paul afterwards revealed to the Saint herself.

What sweetness, Theotimus, of this heavenly spouse towards this sweet and faithful lover! But meantime you see that necessary employments, according to each one's vocation, do not diminish Divine love, but increase it, and gild, as it were, the work of devotion.

The nightingale loves her melody no less when she makes her pauses than when she sings; the devout heart loves love no less when she turns to exterior necessities than when she prays: her silence and her speech, her action and her contemplation, her employment and her rest, equally sing in her the hymn of her love.
 

 
 
1. Ps. xvii. 26.