Yes, of the heart, for nothing but compassion for the sufferings of this Son so dear could be meant by the sword of sorrow that St. Simeon predicted was to pierce the heart of the mother: “And thy own soul a sword shall pierce.”[1241] Already the most holy Virgin, as St. Jerome says, had been enlightened through the divine Scriptures to know the sufferings which the Redeemer was to endure in his life, and still more at the time of his death. She well understood from the prophets, that he was to be betrayed by one of his friends: “Who ate my bread hath greatly supplanted me;”[1242] as David predicted. Abandoned by his disciples: Strike the shepherd, and the sheep shall be scattered: “Percute Pastorem, et dispergentur oves.”[1243] Well did she know the insults, spitting, blows, and derision that he was to suffer from the people: “I have given my body to the strikers, and my cheeks to them that plucked them; I have not turned away my face from them that rebuked me and spit upon me.”[1244] She knew that he was to become the scandal of men, and the outcast of the lowest of the people: “But I am a worm and no man, the reproach of men and the outcast of the people,”[1245] even to be laden with insults and outrages: “He shall be filled with reproaches.”[1246] She knew that at the end of his life his sacred flesh would be torn and bruised by scourges: “He was wounded for our iniquities, he was bruised for our sins,”[1247] so that his body would be wholly disfigured by them, become as a leper, all sores: “There is no beauty in him, nor comeliness, and we have thought him, as it were, a leper,”[1248] even till the bones were uncovered: “They have numbered all my bones.”[1249] She knew that he was to be pierced by nails.[1250] That he was to be reputed with the wicked.[1251] And that finally he was to die, hanging on the cross, slain for the salvation of men: “And they shall look upon me whom they have pierced.”[1252]