irs of angels
had attended at her passage out of this life into a better." St. Abraham
died five years before her: at the news of whose sickness almost the
whole city and country flocked to receive his benediction. When he had
expired, every one strove to procure for themselves some part of his
clothes, and St. Ephrem, who was an eye-witness, relates, that many sick
were cured by the touch of these relics. SS. Abraham and Mary were both
dead when St. Ephrem wrote, who died himself in 378.[1] St. Abraham is
named in the Latin, Greek, and Coptic calendars, and also St. Mary in
those of the Greeks.

St. Abraham converted his desert into a paradise, because he found in it
his God, whose presence makes Heaven. He wanted not the company of men,
who enjoyed that of God and his angels; nor could he ever be at a loss
for employment, to whom both the days and nights were too short for
heavenly contemplation. While his body was employed in penitential
manual labor, his mind and heart were sweetly taken up in God, who was
to him All in All, and the centre of all his desires and affections. His
watchings were but an uninterrupted sacrifice of divine love, and by the
ardor of his desire, and the disposition of his soul and its virtual
tendency to God, his sleep itself was a continuation of his union with
God, and exercise of loving him. He could truly say with the spouse, _I
sleep, but my heart watcheth_. Thus the Christians, who are placed in
distracting stations, may also do, if they accustom themselves to
converse interiorly with God in purity of heart, and in all their
actions and desires have only his will in view. Such a life is a kind of
imitation of the Seraphims, to whom to live and to love are one and the
same thing. "The angels," says St. Gregory the Great, "always carry
their Heaven about with them wheresoever they are sent, because they
never depart from God, or cease to behold him; ever dwelling in the
bosom of his immensity, living and moving in him, and exercising their
ministry in the sanctuary of his divinity." This is the happiness of
every Christian who makes a desert, by interior solitude, in his own
heart.

Footnotes:
1. Bollandus, Papebroke, and Pagi, pretend that St. Abraham the hermit
lived near the Hellespont, and long after St. Ephrem: but are
clearly confuted by Jos. Assemani, Bibl. Orient. t, l, and Com. In
Calend. Univ. t. 5. p. 324, ad 29 Oct. The chronicle of Edessa
assures us that