without refreshment, assistance, or light, to traverse the
stormy desert of tribulation upheld by faith, hope, and charity alone.

His sufferings were inexpressible; but it was by them that he
merited for us the grace necessary to resist those temptations to
despair which will assail us at the hour of death,--that tremendous hour
when we shall feel that we are about to leave all that is dear to us
here below. When our minds, weakened by disease, have lost the power of
reasoning, and even our hopes of mercy and forgiveness are become, as
it were, enveloped in mist and uncertainty,--then it is that we must fly
to Jesus, unite our feelings of desolation with that indescribable
dereliction which he endured upon the Cross, and be certain of
obtaining a glorious victory over our infernal enemies. Jesus then
offered to his Eternal Father his poverty, his dereliction, his
labours, and, above all, the bitter sufferings which our ingratitude
had caused him to endure in expiation for our sins and weakness; no
one, therefore, who is united to Jesus in the bosom of his Church must
despair at the awful moment preceding his exit from this life, even if
he be deprived of all sensible light and comfort; for he must then
remember that the Christian is no longer obliged to enter this dark
desert alone and unprotected, as Jesus has cast his own interior and
exterior dereliction on the Cross into this gulf of desolation,
consequently he will not be left to cope alone with death, or be
suffered to leave this world in desolation of spirit, deprived of
heavenly consolation. All fear of loneliness and despair in death must
therefore be cast away; for Jesus, who is our true light, the Way, the
Truth, and the Life, has preceded us on that dreary road, has
overspread it with blessings, and raised his Cross upon it, one glance
at which will calm our every fear. Jesus then (if we may so express
ourselves) made his last testament in the presence of his Father, and
bequeathed the merits of his Death and Passion to the Church and to
sinners. Not one erring soul was forgotten; he thought of each and
everyone; praying, likewise, even for those heretics who have
endeavoured to prove that, being God, he did not suffer as a man would
have suffered in his place. The cry which he allowed to pass his lips
in the height of his agony was intended not only to show the excess of
the sufferings he was then enduring, but likewise to encourage all
afflicted souls wh