Chapter 40: Of the effects of prayer in adversity

Once, as the community feared an armed attack upon their monastery, they recited the entire Psalter, and at the end of each Psalm, the verse, " 0 Lux beatissima," * with the

Antiphon, " Veni, Sancte Spiritus" Gertrude, who was pray ing fervently with her sisters, knew interiorly that our Lord, by this prayer, had moved the souls of some by the Holy Spirit to perceive their negligences, and to repent. As they felt these movements of compunction, the Saint saw a kind of vapour exhaling from the hearts of those who were thus moved, which covered the monastery and the places around it, and drove away every enemy. And in proportion as the heart of each was moved to compunction and in clined to good, the vapour appeared more powerful in ex pelling evil. Thus she knew that this fear was designed by the Lord to draw to Himself the hearts of His elect con gregation, that, being proved by affliction and purified from their negligences, they might take refuge under His pater nal protection, and find more abundant succour and con solation. Having perceived this, she said to the Lord : " Whence comes it, my loving Lord, that the revelations which Thou hast made to me in Thy gratuitous mercy are so different from those which Thou hast made to others, that persons may often know them, although I so much desire to conceal them 1 " Our Lord replied : " If a master, when questioned by persons who speak different languages, answered each in the one tongue, his discourse would only profit those who understood it ; but if he speaks to each in his own tongue — in Latin to him who understands Latin, and in Greek to him who understands Greek — then eacli can comprehend what is said. Thus the greater the di versity with which I communicate My gifts, the more My impenetrable wisdom is displayed, which replies to each ac cording to their comprehension and the understanding with which I have gifted them, — speaking to the simple by plain and sensible parables, and to the enlightened in a more sublime and hidden manner."