However hard and sharp penance may appear at the first glance, yet it, too, is a daughter of love, love that gives strength to put a curb on carnal appetites, which are ever striving to rebel against the first uncreated love, and which incites to reparation of past offences and atonement for them. It is no wonder, then, that Rita, who was burning with the flame of Divine love, and who had the holiest horror of sin, should carry her austerities even to the point of heroism. True, such innocence did not deserve so great pains; but she who, in her profound humility, thought herself full of defects and faults, who knew human frailty and the frequent dangers of falling into sin, and who was not exempt from the wicked suggestions of the world, the flesh, and the devil, did not consider herself exempt from those penances which she practised, for the good of sinners, as a defence against danger and an assurance of victory in temptation. Her whole life, therefore, was one continued exercise of penance owing to the great self-denial which she exhibited from her early youth, but more markedly in her married life and her widowed state, and owing also to the fastings she practised in the world, and the other mortifications which we mentioned in former chapters, but, above all, owing to the severe and almost incredible chastising of the flesh, which she made a law that she observed during all the years she lived in the cloister. To begin with her fastings, hardly had she embraced the Rule of St. Augustine, which exhorts all to conquer the flesh by fasting as much as health will permit, than she abandoned herself to a life of the most rigorous and prolonged fasting. She never admitted any of those exaggerated pretexts which the delicate sex finds it so easy to allege in order to be dispensed from the laws of fasting and abstinence. She only knew that God is not deceived, and that to desire to deceive one's self is impious folly. She therefore had no hesitation in fulfilling the most rigorous laws of abstinence without any ill-timed fear of injuring her health. Every year she fasted during three entire Lents, and also on the vigils of all holidays of obligation, of all the feasts of the Blessed Virgin, of all the saints of the Order, and of her particular advocates, not to mention other extraordinary fasts which she observed. She took food only once a day, and never drank wine. Her condiments were often wormwood, ashes, and tears. For the greater part of the year she lived on bread and water, and as she advanced in years and progressed in sanctity she reduced her food to such scanty proportions that it was looked on as a miracle how she could in such a way support life. St. Augustine's most prudent Rule does not prescribe such things, and therefore Rita, by her heroic fasts, gave all the more glory to the Most High; and by imitating the abstinences of the Baptist, of St. Nicholas of Tolentine, and her other protectors, all