They corrected the erring according to the rules of the Gospel; they interceded for them with so fervent prayers, with so great concern, and with so happy results, that, like Moses, they appeared to be constituted mediators between the people and God. They steadily hated vice, and practised every virtue. The book from which they learned and cherished sentiments so virtuous was none other than the Passion of the Redeemer. It furnished them with inexhaustible matter for their meditations, for their liveliest compassion, and for that remarkable piety which, from her cradle, they instilled into the heart of Rita, and which they left her as a heritage. In a word, it may with reason be said of them what was said of the parents of St. John the Baptist--that they were both just to the eyes of God, walking without stain in the exact observance of the law. This was their nobility, this was their wealth, which it pleased God to pass to their daughter and to multiply in her in a singular way. Thus we may say, as Blessed Simon of Cascia writes, that the parents' goodness instilled the best dispositions even before her birth into her who was to be born from them, as the goodness of Zachary and Elizabeth went to exalt the holy precursor St. John. Thus these two holy souls, husband and wife, lived a long series of years in these exercises of virtue and piety, without, however, seeing any fruit of their chaste union. God so disposed it that the desires of their youthful years should be vain, that they should labour to detach their minds still more from mortal things, and in order that the proofs of an extraordinary work of His providence should one day shine the brighter. Meanwhile, their desire of offspring, with which nature innocently inspired them, had not only grown cold with advancing years, but was quite extinct; no other care should remain with them now than that of ascending to the eternal heritage of the heavenly Father, instead of descending to the care of children and transmitting their temporal possessions to their posterity on earth. CHAPTER III RITA'S WONDERFUL CONCEPTION That God, who is wonderful in His saints, and who, to use a sacred expression, seems at times to play sport with the world, and especially with those creatures that form His delight, wished in the end, and at a time when in the natural order offspring could least be expected from these old and barren consorts, to grant them in a prodigious manner the fulfilment of their ancient desires--a fulfilment the more acceptable as more unforeseen, and the happier and more certain inasmuch as it was marked and sealed with the seal of the Omnipotent. So great and so remarkable graces can foreshadow only great and remarkable sanctity.