temporal affairs must be undertaken with this intention, and so
conducted as to fall within the compass of this his great design. The
saints so regulated all their ordinary actions, their meals, their
studies, their conversation and visits, their business and toil, whether
tilling a garden or superintending an estate, as to make the love of God
their motive, and the accomplishment of his will their only ambition in
every action. All travail which leadeth not towards this end is but so
much of life misspent and lost, whatever names men may give to their
political or military achievements, study of nature, knowledge of
distant shores, or cunning in the mysteries of trade, or arts of
conversation. Though such actions, when of duty, fall under the order of
our salvation, and must be so moderated, directed, and animated with a
spirit of religion, as to be made means of our sanctification. But in a
Christian life the exercises of devotion, holy desires, and tender
affections, which proceed from a spirit of humble compunction, and an
ardent love of our Saviour, and by which a soul raises herself up to,
and continually sighs after him, are what every one ought most
assiduously and most earnestly to study to cultivate. By these is the
soul more and more purified, and all her powers united to God, and made
heavenly {447} These are properly the most sweet and beautiful flowers
of paradise, or of a virtuous life.

ST. MILBURGE, V.

See Malmesb. l. 2, Regibus, & l. 4, de Pontif. Angl. c. 3. Thorn's
Chron. Capgrave Harpsfield, &c.

SEVENTH CENTURY.

ST. MILBURGE was sister to St. Mildred, and daughter of Merowald, son of
Penda, king of Mercia. Having dedicated herself to God in a religious
state, she was chosen abbess of Wenlock, in Shropshire, which house she
rendered a true paradise of all virtue. The more she humbled herself,
the more she was exalted by God; and while she preferred sackcloth to
purple and diadems, she became the invisible glory of heaven. The love
of purity of heart and holy peace were the subject of her dying
exhortation to her dear sisters. She closed her mortal pilgrimage about
the end of the seventh century. Malmesbury and Harpsfield write, that
many miracles accompanied the translation of her relics, in 1101, on the
26th of May; which Capgrave and Mabillon mistake for the day of her
death: but Harpsfield, who had seen the best ancient English
manuscripts, assures us that she died on the 23d of February,