24. Of her suffering from stone and her foreknowledge before the day of her death

The Virgin of Christ, Lydwine, after being tried in many pains that there might not remain in her the stain of sin, at length with still another most sharp affliction was stricken and cleansed. In the last year of her life therefore, ST. LYDWINE of SCHIEDAM from the feast of the Purification l unto the feast of the following Easter, to gether with the other maladies which she had before for a very long time, she was afflicted with such a pain of the stone, that two or three times, lying as almost dead for nearly an hour, she could not speak. And she endured this suffering with a most intense toothache without any expression of impatience, and at its barely ceasing she was just able to utter only a very few words. And she said that the same stone, which was about the size of a pigeon's egg, would cause her death.

At that time also she was so seldom visited of God by interior consolations that she complained to Master John her confessor with tears that she was in a certain manner abandoned by the Lord beyond all wont. In which desolation, however, greater merit was added to her by her patience, because she was rendered more like to Christ suffering on the cross, Who with a loud voice called to the Father, saying, " My God, My God, why hast Thou forsaken Me?" (Matt, xxvii 46). And this holy virgin, as a true lover and bearer of the cross, per- ST. LYDWINE of SCHIEDAM severed and endured her maladies unto death, which also she had foreknown long before by a revelation from the Lord. For when a certain religious Prior called by her had come to her, to wit, on the feast of the Chair of St. Peter1 the same year in which she died, the next day very early the same Prior was bidden by Master John the virgin's con fessor to enter her cell if he wished to experience any spiritual favour in her regard. When then he had entered her cell he perceived therein such a fra grance of a most sweet odour which the virgin, then visited by the Lord and borne to the heavenly regions, had brought back with her, as if divers aro matic herbs had been scattered in the said cell. After mutual and divine con verse then on those things wherefore she had summoned the Prior, she counselled him to return to her at Easter to confer still about these things in the best manner the Lord should grant. But if he should not find her, that then he should in charity pray for her. From which words it is clearly evident that she said this of her death, although she did not express any mention of death.