De Sales' Evening Examination of Conscience

De Sales sets out the evening exercise in Introduction to the Devout Life, Part II, ch. XI. As night falls, before sleep:

1. Place yourself in God’s presence and give thanks. Begin by becoming aware of God and thanking Him for the day — for its graces, its protection, and the good He enabled you to do. Gratitude comes first, before any reckoning of faults; this ordering is deliberate and central to his approach.
2. Review the day — the examination proper. Go back over the hours and call your conduct to account: where did you act well? Where did you fail — in thought, word, or deed? De Sales has you look especially at how you kept (or broke) the resolution made that morning and at your habitual besetting fault. This is the honest, searching glance — the inquiry into one’s own shadow — but conducted calmly, as an examiner, not a prosecutor.
3. Ask pardon and humble yourself for the faults found — acknowledge them plainly before God, with sorrow but without despair.
4. Resolve and ask grace for tomorrow. Form a specific resolution to amend the fault you noticed, and ask God’s grace to do better, commending the coming night and the next day to His care.
5. Commend yourself to God and rest. Hand the day and yourself over to God for the night, settling into sleep in peace and confidence. Two emphases run through de Sales’ version and distinguish it from a merely guilt-driven inventory:

• Gentleness is non-negotiable. Elsewhere in the Introduction he insists that when we fall, we should correct ourselves “quietly and calmly,” with compassion for our own weakness, never with bitter, agitated self-reproach (which, he warns, does more harm than the fault). The examen inherits this temper: clear-eyed about failure, kind in tone.
• Gratitude frames the whole. By opening with thanks and closing with trustful self-commendation, he brackets the hard look at one’s faults inside an act of confidence — so the practice builds, rather than erodes, the self. (Sourcing note: the evening structure — presence/thanks → examination → pardon → resolution → commend to God — is de Sales, Pt II ch. XI; the insistence on gentle, non-anxious self-correction is his repeated counsel across the Introduction (e.g. Pt III on dealing with one’s faults). Wording here is faithful paraphrase.)

Francis de Sales (1567–1622) wrote for ordinary lay devotion. → (de Sales). The daily examination of conscience / examen is an ancient Christian discipline (with antecedents even in Stoic evening self-review, e.g.

Seneca) and was given its most famous structured form by Ignatius of Loyola in the Spiritual Exercises (the daily “examen”); de Sales adapts it for the layperson and softens its tone.

Downstream, the practice lives on across Catholic devotion and resonates with secular reflective journaling, end-of-day reviews, and gratitude practices.

Ignatian Examen — the five-step daily review (gratitude → review → sorrow → forgiveness → resolve); de Sales’ close cousin, slightly more austere. → (self-review practices).

• Stoic evening review (Seneca, Epictetus) — nightly questioning of the day’s conduct (“What fault did I cure? What weakness resisted?”); the pagan ancestor.
• Reflective journaling / daily review (secular) — writing the day’s wins, failures, and lessons; the modern analogue, often used for self-improvement and CBT-style monitoring.
• Gratitude practice — listing what one is thankful for before sleep; de Sales builds this into step one.
• Shadow inquiry (depth-psychological) — honestly facing one’s own faults and disowned tendencies; the examen is a gentle, structured form of it.

Turning it into self-attack. The single most dangerous error, and the one de Sales warns against most. Anxious, bitter self-reproach harms more than it heals; he prescribes calm, kindly correction. Keep the gentle tone — it is not optional softness, it’s what makes the practice work and keeps it safe.

• Skipping the gratitude. Opening with a fault-hunt instead of thanks tips the whole exercise into negativity. Thanks comes first, by design.
• Vague resolve. “I’ll do better” changes little; name the specific fault and a specific amendment for tomorrow — ideally the one to revisit in the next morning’s offering.
• Endless rumination. The examen is a brief, bounded review, not a nightly trial. Once the day is reviewed, pardoned, and resolved, you commend yourself to God and sleep — the close is part of the method.
• Doing it without the morning bookend. It pairs with the morning offering: the morning sets the resolution, the night checks it. In isolation it loses its through-line.