But let us consider the reasons why the martyrdom of Mary was greater than that of all the martyrs. In the first place, it must be remembered that the martyrs suffered their martyrdom in the body, by means of fire or steel; Mary suffered martyrdom in her soul, as St. Simeon had before prophesied: And thy own soul a sword shall pierce: “Et tuam ipsius animam pertransibit gladius:”[1366] as if the holy old man had said to her: Oh holy Virgin, the bodies of the other martyrs will be torn with iron, but thou wilt be pierced and martyred in thy soul, by the passion of thy own Son. Now, as the soul is more noble than the body, so much greater was the suffering of Mary than that of all the martyrs; as Jesus Christ himself said to St. Catharine of Sienna: There is no comparison between the sufferings of the soul and the body: “Inter dolorem animæ et corporis nulla est comparatio.” Whence the holy abbot Arnold Carnotensis says, that whoever had been present on Calvary at the great sacrifice of the immaculate Lamb, when he was dying on the cross, would have there beheld two great altars, one in the body of Jesus, the other in the heart of Mary; for there, at the same time that the Son sacrificed his body in death, Mary sacrificed her soul in compassion.[1367] Moreover, while the other martyrs, as St. Antoninus says,[1368] suffered by sacrificing their own lives, the blessed Virgin suffered by sacrificing the life of her Son, whom she loved far more than her own life; so that she not only suffered in spirit all that her Son suffered in body, but, moreover, the sight of the sufferings of her Son brought more grief to her heart than if she had endured them all in her own person. There can be no doubt that Mary suffered in her heart all the tortures by which she saw her beloved Jesus tormented. Every one knows that the sufferings of children are also the sufferings of their mothers, when they are the witnesses of them. St. Augustine, considering the anguish that the mother of the Macchabees experienced in witnessing the tortures which her sons endured, says: “She suffered in them all, because she loved them all; and endured with her eyes what they all endured in the flesh.”[1369] Thus also was it with Mary; all those torments, scourgings, thorns, nails, and the cross, which tortured the innocent flesh of Jesus, entered at the same time into the heart of Mary to complete her martyrdom. He in the flesh, she in the heart suffered, writes St. Amadeus: “Ille carne, illa corde passa est.”[1370] So that, as St. Lawrence Justinian says, the heart of Mary became as it were a mirror of the agonies of her Son, in which were seen the spitting, the scourging, the wounds, and all that Jesus suffered.[1371] And St. Bonaventure remarks, that these wounds which were scattered all over the body of Jesus, were all united in the one heart of Mary.[1372]