It is her own teaching, that the nearer the soul approaches to God, the more distinctly also she discerns her sinfulness and misery; the more clearly she sees the many hitherto unsuspected windings and lurking- places of corrupt nature; the better, consequently, she understands how numerous still are the impediments which must be removed before she can fully and freely expand her wings and take her flight to her Lord. Of this truth she had now renewed personal experience. In the high degree of Divine union to which she had attained, she saw her imperfections in a clearer light than ever, and the view filled her with confusion and compunction. That by the help of Divine grace, she had through life been preserved from every sin of deliberation, was the opinion of competent judges, well acquainted with her soul's history. The imperfections which she so bitterly deplored were, then, only an occasional infidelity to the grace which had called her from early years to perfect detachment from creatures and from self, or, at most, they were but the faults of frailty, ignorance, surprise and inadvertence, from which even the saints are not exempt in this life; but, viewed as they now were in their closer contrast with the sanctity of God, they assumed a more serious aspect than ever before. Her habitual horror of the very slightest faults was intensified; her ordinary almost incredible care to avoid them, increased. Inflamed with a holy zeal for the vindication of the rights of Divine justice, as well with an insatiable ardour for the triumph of God's pure love in her soul, she humbly bowed beneath the hand that crucified her, confessing herself deserving of all chastisement, and, praying that the last remnant of the love of self might be exterminated from her heart at any cost of suffering and humiliation. 'O merciful Lord!' she cried, send me a thousand torments, and as many deaths as I respirations, rather than permit that I should offend Thee.' Looking on her slow interior martyrdom as the instrument in God's hand for the purification of her soul, she would not have exchanged its pangs for imaginable joys united. Greatly as her trials on this occasion must have promoted her personal sanctification, a second important result was involved in them. In the generosity of her charity, she had offered herself to suffer for the sins of two persons whose conversion she most ardently desired; while, therefore, the Almighty 'proved her as gold in the furnace, that she might found worthy of Himself' He at the same time 'received her as a victim of a holocaust', that through her sufferings other souls might be made worthy of Him too (Wisdom iii. 5,6). But if He accepted the oblation, and rewarded the sacrifice, it was not until the victim had been entirely immolated.