licity
and ingenuousness.

She never considered her visions to have any reference to her
exterior Christian life, nor did she regard them as being of any
historical value. Exteriorly she knew and believed nothing but the
catechism, the common history of the Bible, the gospels for Sundays and
festivals, and the Christian almanac, which to her far-sighted vision
was an inexhaustible mine of hidden riches, since it gave her in a few
pages a guiding thread which led her through all time, and by means of
which she passed from mystery to mystery, and solemnised each with all
the saints, in order to reap the fruits of eternity in time, and to
preserve and distribute them in her pilgrimage around the
ecclesiastical year, that so the will of God might be accomplished on
earth as it is in Heaven. She had never read the Old or the New
Testaments, and when she was tired of relating her visions, she would
sometimes say: 'Read that in the Bible,' and then be astonished to learn
that it was not there; 'for,' she would add, 'people are constantly saying
in these days that you need read nothing but the Bible, which contains
everything, etc., etc.'

The real task of her life was to suffer for the Church and for some
of its members, whose distress was shown her in spirit, or who asked
her prayers without knowing that this poor sick nun had something more
to do for them than to say the Pater noster, but that all their
spiritual and corporal sufferings became her own, and that she had to
endure patiently the most terrible pains, without being assisted, like
the contemplatives of former days, by the sympathising prayers of an
entire community. In the age when she lived, she had no other
assistance than that of medicine. While thus enduring sufferings which
she had taken upon herself for others, she often turned her thoughts to
the corresponding sufferings of the Church, and when thus suffering for
one single person, she would likewise offer all she endured for the
whole Church.

The following is a remarkable instance of the sort: During several
weeks she had every symptom of consumption; violent irritation of the
lungs, excessive perspiration, which soaked her whole bed, a racking
cough, continual expectoration, and a strong continual fever. So
fearful were her sufferings that her death was hourly expected and even
desired. It was remarked that she had to struggle strangely against a
strong temptation to irritability. Did she yield for a