uilt on the place where he landed,
have transmitted the memory of this miracle to posterity. {203} This
relation is taken from the bull of his canonization, and the earliest
historians of his life. The king became a sincere convert, and governed
his conscience, and even his kingdoms, by the advice of St. Raymund from
that time till the death of the saint. The holy man prepared himself for
his passage to eternity, by employing days and nights in penance and
prayer. During his last illness, Alphonsus, king of Castile, with his
queen, sons, and brother; and James, king of Aragon, with his court,
visited him, and received his last benediction. He armed himself with
the last sacraments; and, in languishing sighs of divine love, gave up
his soul to God, on the 6th of January, in the year 1275, and the
hundredth of his age. The two kings, with all the princes and princesses
of their royal families, honored his funeral with their presence: but
his tomb was rendered far more illustrious by miracles. Several are
recorded in the bull of his canonization, published by Clement VIII. in
1601. Bollandus has filled fifteen pages in folio with an account of
them. His office is fixed by Clement X. to the 23d of January.

* * * * *

The saints first learned in solitude to die to the world and themselves,
to put on the spirit of Christ, and ground themselves in a habit of
recollection and a relish only for heavenly things, before they entered
upon the exterior functions even of a spiritual ministry. Amidst these
weighty employments, not content with reserving always the time and
means of frequent retirement for conversing with God and themselves, in
their exterior functions by raising their minds to heaven with holy
sighs and desires, they made all their actions in some measure an
uninterrupted prayer and exercise of divine love and praise. St.
Bonaventure reckons it among the general exercises of every religious or
spiritual man,[1] "That he keep his mind always raised, at least
virtually, to God: hence, whensoever a servant of God has been
distracted from attending to him for ever so short a space, he grieves
and is afflicted, as if he was fallen into some misfortune, by having
been deprived of the presence of such a friend who never forgets us.
Seeing that our supreme felicity and glory consists in the eternal
vision of God, the constant remembrance of him is a kind of imitation of
that happy state: _this