A perfect spirit of sincere humility is the spirit of the most sublime and heroic degree of Christian virtue and perfection. As the great work of the sanctification of our souls is to be begun by humility, so must it be completed by the same. Humility invites the Holy Ghost into the soul, and prepares her to receive his graces; and from the most perfect charity, which he infuses, she derives a new interior light, and an experimental knowledge of God and herself, with an _infused_ humility far clearer in the light of the understanding, in which she sees God's infinite greatness, and her own total insufficiency, baseness, and nothingness, after a quite new manner; and in which she conceives a relish of contempt and humiliations as her due, feels a secret sentiment of joy in suffering them, sincerely loves her own abjection, dependence, and correction, dreads the esteem and praises of others, as snares by which a mortal poison may imperceptibly insinuate itself into her affections, and deprive her of the divine grace; is so far from preferring herself to any one, that she always places herself below all creatures, is almost sunk in the deep abyss of her own nothingness, never speaks of herself to her own advantage, or affects a show of modesty in order to appear humble before men, in all good, gives the _entire_ glory to God alone, and as to herself, glories only in her infirmities, pleasing herself in her own weakness and nothingness, rejoicing that God is the great _all_ in her and in all creatures. Footnotes: 1. Ps. 150. {112} ST. LUCIAN, APOSTLE OF BEAUVAIS, IN FRANCE. HE preached the gospel in Gaul, in the third century; came from Rome, and was probably one of the companions of St. Dionysius, of Paris, or at least of St. Quintin. He sealed his mission with his blood at Beauvais, under Julian, vicar or successor to the bloody persecutor Rictius Varus, in the government of Gaul, about the year 290. Maximian, called by the common people Messien, and Julian, the companions of his labors, were crowned with martyrdom at the same place a little before him. His relics, with those of his two colleagues, were discovered in the seventh age, as St. Owen informs us in his life of St. Eligius. They are shown in three gilt shrines, in the abbey which bears his name, and was founded in the eighth century. Rabanus Maurus says, that these relics were famous for miracles in the ninth century.