well-known models of penitence, she rendered them the truest honour, for the best way of honouring the saints is to imitate their virtues. But not only did she try to follow their example by penances of this sort, but in all the other austerities of her life she endeavoured to imitate them as exactly as her condition allowed. The very dwelling-place in which she hid herself proclaimed her penitential disposition, for it was only a little cell, bare and dark, and had rather the appearance of a prison to which she had been condemned for some serious crime. We do not know for certainty whether even for appearance' sake there was a bed in it, but we do know very well that when Rita was overcome by natural weariness she took her short repose stretched on the ground, or, at best, on a board. She rose without fail from that hardest of couches at midnight to begin the infliction of greater torment on herself; for at that hour she scourged herself with a scourge of iron in order to appease Divine justice in favour of the souls in purgatory, who, though still of the communion of saints and participators in our suffrages, are left to suffer the greatest sorrow, deprived as they are of the Beatific Vision and tortured by the pain of their fires. Her great charity made her feel the holiest compassion for these unhappy souls, and it was charity that nerved her arm to continue these scourgings; but if she ever felt for herself charity, too, might have induced her to lay aside her ensanguined whip of iron. On two other occasions every day she took the discipline, once for the benefactors of her convent and Order, when she used thongs of leather, and again for the conversion of sinners, at which her whip was of twisted and knotted cords. With all this she was not satisfied if that rebellious enemy her flesh were not suffering continual pain, and hence she always wore next her skin a cilicium made of rough bristles, and on the inner side of her habit she fastened thorns that pricked her painfully at every movement she made. Amongst these thorns and the painful practices of her life our saint lay hidden, like the mystic lily of the sacred Canticles, inaccessible to passions, guarded on every side, growing more beautiful and brighter every day, because more like her heavenly Spouse crowned with thorns. CHAPTER VII RITA'S SPIRIT OF PRAYER