e higher safety really arrive. As a concrete
example let me read a page from the biography of Antoinette Bourignon,
a good woman, much persecuted in her day by both Protestants and
Catholics, because she would not take her religion at second hand.
When a young girl, in her father's house--

"She spent whole nights in prayer, oft repeating: Lord, what wilt thou
have me to do? And being one night in a most profound penitence, she
said from the bottom of her heart: 'O my Lord! What must I do to
please thee? For I have nobody to teach me. Speak to my soul and it
will hear thee.' At that instant she heard, as if another had spoke
within her: Forsake all earthly things. Separate thyself from the
love of the creatures. Deny thyself. She was quite astonished, not
understanding this language, and mused long on these three points,
thinking how she could fulfill them. She thought she could not live
without earthly things, nor without loving the creatures, nor without
loving herself. Yet she said, 'By thy Grace I will do it, Lord!' But
when she would perform her promise, she knew not where to begin.
Having thought on the religious in monasteries, that they forsook all
earthly things by being shut up in a cloister, and the love of
themselves by subjecting of their wills, she asked leave of her father
to enter into a cloister of the barefoot Carmelites, but he would not
permit it, saying he would rather see her laid in her grave. This
seemed to her a great cruelty, for she thought to find in the cloister
the true Christians she had been seeking, but she found afterwards that
he knew the cloisters better than she, for after he had forbidden her,
and told her he would never permit her to be a religious, nor give her
any money to enter there, yet she went to Father Laurens, the Director,
and offered to serve in the monastery and work hard for her bread, and
be content with little, if he would receive her. At which he smiled
and said: That cannot be. We must have money to build; we take no
maids without money; you must find the way to get it, else there is no
entry here.

"This astonished her greatly, and she was thereby undeceived as to the
cloisters, resolving to forsake all company and live alone till it
should please God to show her what she ought to do and whither to go.
She asked always earnestly, 'When shall I be perfectly thine, O my
God?' And she thought he still answered her, When thou shalt no longer
possess