Flower of Devotion

St. Agnes once said to St. Bridget:

“There are sinners who say to themselves: It is difficult to walk the narrow path and to renounce one’s own will and honors. Therefore they indulge in false and dangerous hope. Our journey, they say, is long, God’s love is great, this world is full of consolations and made for joy; Therefore, there is nothing to prevent us from using the world according to our will for a time. At the end of our lives, we will be obedient to God. For there is a side path beside the way of this world, and that is repentance and confession; If we follow this path, we will save ourselves.
Such a thought, expressing the desire to sin for the rest of one’s life and then to do penance, gives people only a very weak certainty. For they never know when they can die. Sometimes, too, they will suffer so much in the last hour, and the end will come so suddenly, that they will no longer be able to make effective contrition. And rightly so, for they did not want to foresee the future danger, although they should have reckoned with it; but they sought to draw the mercy of God into the sphere of their will, and to set limits to it. Nor did they resolve to cease to sin until sin could no longer give them pleasure.