justice, contradicted him by not wishing to hear him when he prayed to him, saying: “Father, if it be possible, let this chalice pass from me;”[1418] and abandoned him to fear, weariness, and sadness, so that our afflicted Lord said: “My soul is sorrowful even unto death.”[1419] His interior suffering even caused him to sweat blood. Contradicted and persecuted, in a word, in his body and his life, for he was tortured in all his sacred members: in his hands, in his feet, in his face, in his head, in his whole body, till, drained to the last drop of his blood, he died an ignominious death on the cross. When David, in the midst of all his pleasures and royal grandeur, heard from Nathan the prophet that his son should die—“The child that is born to thee shall surely die”[1420]—he could find no peace, but wept, fasted, and slept upon the ground. Mary received with the greatest calmness the announcement that her Son should die, and peacefully continued to submit to it; but what grief she must have continually suffered, seeing this amiable Son always near her, hearing from him words of eternal life, and beholding his holy demeanor. Abraham suffered great affliction during the three days he passed with his beloved Isaac, after he knew that he was to lose him. Oh God! not for three days, but for thirty-three years, Mary had to endure a like sorrow. Like, do I say? A sorrow as much greater as the Son of Mary was more lovely than the son of Abraham. The blessed Virgin herself revealed to St. Bridget,[1421] that while she lived on the earth there was not an hour when this grief did not pierce her soul: As often, she continued, as I looked upon my Son, as often as I wrapped him in his swaddling clothes, as often as I saw his hands and his feet, so often was my soul overwhelmed as it were with a fresh sorrow, because I considered how he would be crucified.[1422] Rupert the Abbot, contemplating Mary, while she was suckling her Son, imagines her addressing him in these words: “A bundle of myrrh is my beloved to me, he shall abide between my breasts.”[1423] Ah, my Son, I clasp thee in my arms, because thou art so dear to me; but the dearer thou art to me, the more thou dost become to me a bundle of myrrh and of sorrow, when I think of thy sufferings. Mary, says St. Bernardine of Sienna,[1424] considered that the strength of the saints was to pass through death; the beauty of paradise to be deformed; the Lord of the universe to be bound as a criminal; the Creator of all things to be livid with stripes; the Judge of all to be condemned; the glory of heaven despised; the King of kings to be crowned with thorns, and treated as a mock king.