grace, and that eternity's light alone will reveal the ineffable wonders which God discovered to her soul at the time of her sacramental union with him." We know from the testimony of the saints who have endured the martyrdom of Divine love, that the greatest of its pains proceeds from the inability of the soul to lore God with an ardour proportioned either to her own desire to love Him, or to the extent of His claims on her love. This suffering the Venerable Mother experienced in its fullest intensity. From, her insatiable desire of a more perfect love, sprang a fixed impression of her utter powerlessness to do any thing for, or give any thing to the great and generous God who had given her Himself, and with Himself all things. "Thou hast made me for Thyself, O God!" she would say; "for Thyself who art Love; why then should I not speak of love? But alas! what can I say of it? I cannot speak of it on earth. The saints who see Thee in heaven, silently adore Thee, and their silence speaks. Why, O Lord, cannot we burn like them with silent love? If Thou art their love, Thou art also ours. They see Thee as Thou art, and in this are more favoured than we on earth, but when we are released from this prison, we shall behold Thee like them; we shall praise, embrace, possess Thee like them; we shall be absorbed in Thee as they are,--in Thee who art my Love, my only Love, my great and glorious God, my mercy and my All!" While her soul was thus rapt in a continual ecstasy of love, her bodily strength wasted away under the action of the consuming fire. In one of the many phases of the martyrdom of love which it was her privilege to pass through, it pleased her Lord that the body should suffer more than the soul, enduring in its turn a real agony, and that so violent, that she says she must have died if it had lasted a few days.