ors, or who bring it about
that others do the same."

"This revelation," says Mgr. Bougaud, "is unquestionably the most
important of all the revelations which have illumined the Church since
that of the Incarnation and of the Lord's Supper.... After the
Eucharist, the supreme effort of the Sacred Heart."[203] Well, what
were its good fruits for Margaret Mary's life? Apparently little else
but sufferings and prayers and absences of mind and swoons and
ecstasies. She became increasingly useless about the convent, her
absorption in Christ's love--

"which grew upon her daily, rendering her more and more incapable of
attending to external duties. They tried her in the infirmary, but
without much success, although her kindness, zeal, and devotion were
without bounds, and her charity rose to acts of such a heroism that our
readers would not bear the recital of them. They tried her in the
kitchen, but were forced to give it up as hopeless--everything dropped
out of her hands. The admirable humility with which she made amends
for her clumsiness could not prevent this from being prejudicial to the
order and regularity which must always reign in a community. They put
her in the school, where the little girls cherished her, and cut pieces
out of her clothes [for relics] as if she were already a saint, but
where she was too absorbed inwardly to pay the necessary attention.
Poor dear sister, even less after her visions than before them was she
a denizen of earth, and they had to leave her in her heaven."[204]

[203] Bougaud: Hist. de la bienheureuse Marguerite Marie, Paris, 1894,
pp. 365, 241.

[204] Bougaud: Op. cit., p. 267.

Poor dear sister, indeed! Amiable and good, but so feeble of
intellectual outlook that it would be too much to ask of us, with our
Protestant and modern education, to feel anything but indulgent pity
for the kind of saintship which she embodies. A lower example still of
theopathic saintliness is that of Saint Gertrude, a Benedictine nun of
the thirteenth century, whose "Revelations," a well-known mystical
authority, consist mainly of proofs of Christ's partiality for her
undeserving person. Assurances of his love, intimacies and caresses
and compliments of the most absurd and puerile sort, addressed by
Christ to Gertrude as an individual, form the tissue of this
paltry-minded recital.[205] In reading such a narrative, we realize the
gap between the thirteenth and the twentieth century, an