Fifteenth meditation. The particular benefit of the religious vocation

First point.

Eefleot that Solomon, having regarded all things that are under the heavens, protests that " all is vanity, and affliction of spirit" What, then, do we leave for God when we enter the religions life? Nothing but phantoms and appearances of good; and if the prophets inform us that all things are as if they did not exist before Thee, if all is but nothing, O my God, what have we left personally? Our misery is always extreme. We are so blind that we persuade ourselves that we have done great things for Thee in abandoning these nothings, while all the time it is Thou, O Lord, who hast done great things for us in leading us to renounce them.

Second point.

Eeflect that you were not capable of choosing a vocation so holy. It is God who, in BHs incomparable love, has called you to it, constraining you without violence to depart from Sodom and to enter into His banquet. The religious life is not a natural one. It is elevated above nature. It is, therefore, necessary that grace should bestow it and be its soul.

Third point.

Consider what gratitude you should testify to our divine Lord and Saviour, who has deigned through the instrumentality of His blessed Mother, to change the water of your life into wine; that is, to turn your faults into virtues, and to make you all His. Ask of God great thankfulness for this grace, which is not less than the grace of vocation. The ingratitude of the children of Israel, withdrawn from the bondage of Egypt into the solitude of the desert, so greatly irritated the Lord that He wished to exterminate them one and all.

Affections. Lord, what have I left in quitting the world, but poverty full of care, or some miserable possession full of inquietude? I have abandoned trouble, anguish, dissension, continual occasions of losing my soul; and Thou hast given me a life sweet, tranquil, full of holy union and furnished with a thousand means of raising my soul to Thee. O my God! I admit that Thou hast done much for me, and that I have done nothing for Thee, by entering upon this vocation. I am a useless servant; moreover,

I am ungrateful, if I do not fulfil the end for which Thou didst call me to Thy blessed service.

my God, for this most precious benefit which Thou hast bestowed upon me? I will fulfil my vows to Thee by a punctual observance before all Thy people; that is to say, O my King, that, assisted by Thy grace, I will live the life of a trueEeligious, my soul at all times elevated to Thee, doing continual violence to nature, loving self-contempt, never blaming those that blame me, nor leaving the strait and narrow road which conducts to life eternal. O most blessed Virgin! since it is by your intercession that I have received the grace to dwell in your house all the days of my life, help me to live there in such a manner that you will not refuse to acknowledge me as your daughter.

Lord, Thou didst say in times past: " What can I do for Israel that I have not done? " Ah! it seems to me that the following words are addressed to my soul: " O thoughtless Religious, what has Our Lord not done for you? And you do not return the gratitude due Him. Oh! you should delight to find yourself out of Egypt, to keep yourself amorously retired, to fly from everything that appertains to the world; but on the contrary, you irritate your Spouse by seeking more earnestly, perhaps, your satisfactions and conveniences than you did when in the world." O my Beloved, I admit that I have not deserved to taste Thy sweet manna. But for the future I renounce everything; I am dead to the world. A thousand times I bless the day on which I died, in order to live only for Thee.