ruggles are almost
insupportable, but less so than if I were surrounded by those who
have an affection for me. To worry others without their being able to
give me any relief would only increase my suffering, and finally
become unbearable. All is for the best! God's will be done!"

What he wrote to a friend suffering from illness he applied to
himself; he made spiritual profit, as best he might, from separation
from the men and the vocation he loved so well:

"I can sympathize with you more completely in your sickness being
myself not well. To be shut off from the world, and cut off from
human activity--and this is what it means to be sick--gives the soul
the best conditions to love God alone, and this is Paradise upon
earth. Blessed sickness! which detaches the soul from all creatures
and unites it to its sovereign Good. But one's duties and
responsibilities, what of these in the meantime? We must give them
all up one day, and why not now? We think ourselves necessary, and
others try to make us believe the same; there is but little truth and
much self-love in this. 'What else do I require of thee,' says our
Lord in Thomas a Kempis, 'than that thou shouldst resign thyself
integrally to Me.' This is what our Lord is fighting for in our
souls."

Yet in having his life-work torn away from him he was like a man
whose leg has been crushed and then amputated, the phantom of the
lost limb aching in every muscle, bone, and nerve. This was partly
the secret of his pain while in Europe, at the mere thought of his
former active life; it haunted him with memories of its lost
opportunities, its shortcomings in motive or achievement, or what he
fancied to be such, in view of the Divine justice, now always
reckoning with him.

He was ever cheerful in word, even when the pallor of his face and
the blazing of his eyes betrayed his bodily and spiritual pain. "The
end of religion is joy, joy here no less than joy hereafter," he once
insisted, and he argued long and energetically for the proposition;
but meantime he was racked with inner agony and was too feeble to
walk alone. In his letters and diaries he speaks of his illness and
of its symptoms as of those of another person of whom he was giving
news.

His wanderings in Europe were like gropings after the Divine will in
the midst of the spirit's night, often in anguish, often in
tranquillity, never in his former bounding joy, always with
submission, beforehand, at the moment, and