Once assured of this point, M. de
St. Cyran became immovable. Mother Angelica pressed him to appear before
the archbishop's council, which was to pronounce upon his book _Theologie
familiere_. "It is always good to humble one's self," she said. "As for
you," he replied, "who are in that disposition, and would not in any
respect compromise the honor of the truth, you could do it; but as for
me, I should break down before the eyes of God if I consented thereto;
the weak are more to be feared sometimes than the wicked."

Mother Angelica Arnauld, to whom these lines were addressed, was the most
perfect image and the most accomplished disciple of M. de St. Cyran.
More gentle and more human than he, she was quite as strong and quite as
zealous. "It is necessary to be dead to everything, and after that to
await everything; such was the motto of her inward life and of the
constant effort made by this impassioned soul, susceptible of all tender
affections, to detach herself violently and irrevocably from earth. The
instinct of command, loftiness and breadth of views, find their place
with the holy priest and with the nun; the mind of M. de St. Cyran was
less practical and his judgment less simple than that of the abbess,
habituated as she had been from childhood to govern the lives of her nuns
as their conscience. A reformer of more than one convent since the day
when she had closed the gates of Port-Royal against her father,
M. Arnauld, in order to restore the strictness of the cloister, Mother
Angelica carried rule along with her, for she carried within herself the
government, rigid, no doubt, for it was life in a convent, but
characterized by generous largeness of heart, which caused the yoke to be
easily borne.

"To be perfect, there is no need to do singular things," she would often
repeat, after St. Francis de Sales; "what is needed is to do common
things singularly well!" She carried the same zeal from convent to
convent, from Port-Royal des Champs to Port-Royal de Paris; from
Maubuisson, whither her superiors sent her to establish a reformation, to
St. Sacrement, to establish union between the two orders; ever devoted to
religion, without having chosen her vocation; attracting around her all
that were hers; her mother, a wife at twelve years of age, and astonished
to find herself obeying after having commanded her twenty children for
fifty years; five of her sisters; nieces and cousins; and in "the
Desert," besid