ever, make resolutions beforehand, that you may then be found prepared and strong.
Let not your resolutions be estimated by their effects, even though you should have long and rightly exercised yourself in virtue, but be humble as to them, and distrust yourself and your own weakness; and, putting your trust in God, with frequent prayers, fly to Him for succour and protection from dangers, and especially from the danger of the very least presumption and self-confidence.
But in the case of slight defects, which sometimes the Lord permits to remain unconquered in order to increase our self-knowledge or to guard some other good in us, it is notwithstanding allowable to form resolutions of attaining to some higher degree of perfection.
CHAPTER XXXI.
Of the Devil's Deceits and Struggles to draw us away from the Path of Perfection.
THE fourth deceit of the Evil One, as I have already mentioned, is to excite within us, when he sees us steadily advancing in holiness, sundry good desires, in order to lead us from the practice of virtues into wickedness.
A sick person, for instance, is bearing his
