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“At times, especially during the great retreat before making the vows, I was as it were inebriated with love, so that I scarcely knew what I said or did.

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“This was the stage of my interior life on entering the house of studies at Wittem, October, 1846.  Here the principal acts in all my spiritual exercises were those of resignation and conformity to the will of God, an entire fidelity to the inspirations and attractions of the Holy Spirit, and a total abandonment of myself to the conduct of Divine Providence.  God seemed always engaged in my soul by means of His grace in repressing my own activity.  The end of my proper activity, I said to myself, is its destruction.  God commands a total and entire abandonment of the soul to Him in order that He may with 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.]

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