h
his grace destroy and annihilate all that He finds in it against His
designs and will. God at times seemed to demand of me a frightful and
heroic abandonment of my soul to His good pleasure. God alone knows
how to exercise the soul in virtue, and the Holy Spirit is its only
true master in the spiritual life. Not only did the spirit of God
excite and elicit in me voluntary acts of self-abandonment, but often
my soul was as if stripped of all support, and placed, as it were,
over a dark and unfathomable abyss, and thus I was made to see that
my only hope was to give myself up wholly to Him. The words of Job
well express this purgation of the soul when he says: 'The arrows of
the Lord are in me, the rage whereof drinketh up my spirit, and the
terrors of the Lord war against me.' (Here follow other quotations
from the book of Job.) Sometimes these pains penetrate into the
remotest and most secret chambers of the soul. The faculties are in
such an intensive purgation that from the excessive pain which this
subtile and purifying fire causes they are suspended from their
ordinary activity, and the soul, incapable of receiving any relief or
escaping from its suffering, has nothing left but to resign itself to
the will and good pleasure of God. Though enveloped with an unseen
but no less real fire, suffering in every part, limb, and fibre from
indescribable pains, fixed like one who should be forced to look the
sun constantly in the face at midday, she is nevertheless content,
for she has a secret consciousness that God is the cause of all her
sufferings, and not only content--she would suffer still more for His
love."

[Here follows an account of the mortifications to which this interior
pressure drove him, shortening of sleep, wearing hair-shirts, severe
discipline, abstinence and fasting, and the like.]

. . . . . . . .

"There were no penances that I have read of that seemed to me
impossible. The vilest habits and other things that I was allowed to
wear and to use gave me the greatest pleasure. The thought of not
having wherewith to cover my nakedness, to be contemned, ridiculed,
and spit upon, gave me an extreme joy. My delight consisted in
wanting that which is considered necessary . . . all this I did not
only do without reluctance, difficulty, and pain, but with great
pleasure, ease, and joy. They seemed as nothing, and I was as though
I had scarcely need of a body in order to live, or, in other words