she desired that her heart could burn even with infinite love, that so she might love her God adequately. She prayed our Lord to place her heart on His, that on that altar of fire it might be made a perfect holocaust of love. "I ask of Him," she said, "no earthly riches, treasures or joys, but only that I may die of His love." Under the severest temporal losses, even in the midst of privations and positive want, she felt, she said, as if needing nothing, for then especially she belonged to God, and God belonged to her, and possessing Him, she had nothing to desire. She had indeed reached that blessed state in which the soul exists more in the God whom she loves, than in the body which she animates. [Footnote: Words quoted by Gerson from St. Augustine and St Bernard.] Yet elevated as she was to sublimest heights of supernatural contemplation, she never failed carefully to prepare a subject of ordinary meditation, true to the end, to her love of common practices, and her esteem of common ways, from which, as we have so often remarked, she never swerved but in obedience to the irresistible attraction of the Holy Spirit, and she ever maintained that the most exalted spiritual state is that distinguished, not by raptures and ecstasies, but by the perfect practice of the maxims of the Gospel, and the closest interior union with Jesus. Her piety was solid and practical, and in one of her letters to her son, we find the remark that she never could content herself with a devotion of mere sentiment and imagination. Our Lord, she said, assumed our nature, that He might become our Model. In every condition, we can imitate Him by the practice of His maxims, which not only discover to us what we have to retrench and correct in our lives and conduct, but also guide us to the means of accomplishing that difficult work of self-correction. Devotion that is not practical, seemed to her, she said, like an edifice built on moving sand.