Dearest and most beloved brother in Christ Jesus: I Catherine, servant and slave of the servants of Jesus Christ, comfort you in the Precious Blood of the Son of God: with desire to see you wholly in accord with the Will of God, and transformed thereby; knowing that this is a sweet and holy yoke which makes all bitterness turn into sweetness. Every great burden becomes light beneath this most holy yoke of the sweet will of God, without which thou couldst not please God, but wouldst know a foretaste of Hell. Comfort you, comfort you, dearest brother, and do not faint beneath this chastisement of God; but trust that when human help fails, divine help is near. God will provide for you. Reflect that Job lost his possessions and his sons and his health: his wife remained to him for a perpetual scourge; and then, when God had tested his patience, He restored everything to him double, and at the end eternal life. Patient Job never was perturbed, but would say, always exercising the virtue of holy patience, "God gave them to me, God has taken them from me; the Name of God be blessed." So I want you to do, dearest brother: be a lover of virtue, with holy patience, often using confession, which will as often help you to endure your afflictions. And I tell you, God will show His benignity and mercy, and will reward you for every affliction which you shall have borne for His love. Remain in the holy and sweet grace of God. Sweet Jesus, Jesus Love. TO THE VENERABLE RELIGIOUS, BROTHER ANTONIO OF NIZZA, OF THE ORDER OF THE HERMIT BROTHERS OF SAINT AUGUSTINE AT THE WOOD OF THE LAKE It is in her letters to persons leading the dedicated life that one can most clearly study Catherine's own inner experience. When warning and consoling them, she is speaking to herself. This obscure girl had a way of writing to the great of this earth--and indeed to the very Fathers of Christendom--with the straightforward simplicity of a teacher instructing childish minds in the evident rudiments of virtue. Often the sanctified common sense of her letters to dignitaries is the most noticeable thing about them. But when she turns to a holy hermit, the tone changes. The commonplaces of the moral life are assumed or left behind; she speaks to a soul that has presumably already brought its will into accord with the divine will in regard to all outward happenings, and she takes calmly for granted that this is a light and little thing. We proceed to the analysis of temptations more subtle and more alluring. Catherine has few superiors among religious thinkers in the power to trace self-will to its remotest lairs, in the deeper reaches of personality. In letters to such correspondents as Frate Antonio she often gives us, as here, precious records of her intercourse with her Lord. In the Name of Jesus Christ crucified and of sweet Mary: