, I advise you to have
that practice written out in a fair large hand, and expose it in some
public place, that they who are willing to make use of it may read and
transcribe it at their own convenience.

"They who shall be desirous of being received into the society, and whom
you shall judge to be proper for it, you may send them to Goa with a
letter, which shall point out their design, and their talents for it, or
else you may retain them with you. In this last case, after you have
caused them to perform the spiritual exercises for a month together, you
shall make a trial of them, in some such manner as may edify the people
without exposing them to be ridiculous. Order them, therefore, to serve
the sick in the hospitals, and to debase themselves to the meanest and
most distasteful offices. Make them visit the prisoners, and teach them
how to give comfort to the miserable. In fine, exercise your novices in
all the practices of humility and mortification; but permit them not to
appear in public in extravagant habits, which may cause them to be
derided by the multitude;--suffer it not, I say, far from imposing it
upon them. Engage not all the novices indifferently to those trials which
their nature most abhors; but examine well the strength of each, and suit
their mortification to their temper, to their education, to the advance
they make in spirituals, in such sort, that the trial may not be
unprofitable, but that it may produce its effect according to that
measure of grace which is given them. If he who directs the novices has
not all these considerations, it will fall out, that they who were
capable of making a great proficiency in virtue, with good management,
will lose their courage, and go backward; and besides, those indiscreet
trials, too difficult for beginners, take off the love of the master from
his novices, and cause his disciples to lessen their confidence in his
directions. In the mean time, whoever forms young people to a religious
life, ought to leave nothing untried to bring them to a candid and free
discovery of their evil inclinations, and the suggestions of the devil,
at the same moment when they are tempted: for without this they will
never be able to disentangle themselves from the snares of the tempter;
never will they arrive to a religious perfection. On the contrary, those
first seeds of evil being brooded over, and nourished, as I may say, by
silence, will insensibly produce most lamentable effe