practise child-like humility, so as to deserve a place among the little ones of whom our Lord declared is the kingdom of heaven. Sinking ever lower and deeper into her nothingness, she found there a resting-place for her soul, a security against illusion, a safeguard for her virtue, and an antidote for self-complacent thoughts, if by a rare chance, imagination ever suggested one. The extraordinary graces with which God favoured her, far from exalting, served only to lower her in her own estimation. She fully recognised the magnificence of those graces, but wholly separating the great Giver from the lowly recipient, she viewed them in Him, not in herself; they were His always, hers never, and provided they redounded to His glory, she asked no more. "I am overwhelmed with astonishment," she writes, "that a God who is loved purely by myriads of millions of souls, should cast His eyes on me, the last of His creatures, and condescend to grant me a share in His love." And again, "If a soul is beautiful, good, or holy, it is with the beauty, the goodness and the holiness of God. Knowing that these attributes belong wholly to Him, she desires that He alone should have the honour of them, wishing no honour or praise for herself from any creature. Her only fear is lest vain complacency should open the door of the inner temple to the enemy, who would soon despoil her of her gifts." "Tremble for me," she said to her son, "when you hear of the favours which the Almighty has conferred on me, for He has placed His treasures in the very frailest of earthen vessels: the vessel may at any moment be broken and the contents lost." This humble distrust of human weakness never left her heart. "O my great God!" she would say, "grant me humility, and help me to serve Thee as Thou commandest, in fear and trembling." "I am now near my end," she wrote two years before her death, "and I have yet done nothing worthy of a soul soon to appear before God. Our Lord has ever led me by the spirit of love and confidence, never by that of fear, but when I consider that through the frailty of my fallen nature, I may at any moment lose the Divine friendship, I am seized with dread, and overwhelmed with humiliation. I could not exist if I retained this apprehension of separation from God,--that all-good God from whom I have received more graces and favours than there are grains of sand in the ocean bed. But my firm confidence in His mercy dispels alarm, and rejecting doubts and fears, I cast myself trustingly into His arms, there to repose in peace." Her superior intelligence and eminent virtue would have rendered her a very desirable acquisition to the Jansenists, who used their best efforts to allure her to their ranks, but her humility was her safeguard, and to manifest her horror of their innovations, she would not even reply to their letters.