Letter 77. To a Lady

ON THE DEATH OF HER NEW-BORN CHILD. My Dear Child, Annecy, Dec, 2, 1619.

The Father Confessor of Sainte Claire de Grenoble has just told me that you have been exceedingly ill... I can imagine your dear heart accepting all these trials as blessings with a perfect submission to His Divine Will, from Whose Fatherly Hand they come. Oh, how happy that little babe is to have taken flight like an angel to Heaven, almost before it had lighted upon earth I What a precious pledge for you up there,* my dear child! But I know well that you have communed not a little with your Saviour, heart to heart, over all this trial; He has before now soothed all the shrinking tenderness of your mother's heart; and you have many a time poured out your childlike trust in His own words, “ Even so. Father, for so it seemed good in Thy Sight" Oh, my dear child, if so you are most blessed, you are “ dead ” with your babe in Christ, and your life is hid in Him with God, and when He, Who is our life, shall appear, then shall ye also appear with Him in glory." * So speaks the Holy Ghost in Holy Scripture.

We groan, we suffer, we die with those we love, by reason of our great love for them; and when they suffer and die in our Lord, and we accept their suffering and death for love of Him Who suffered and died for us, we are indeed ** dead ” with Him and them. These are the true spiritual riches, my dear child, and we shall realise it one day, when for our “ present light afflictions" we receive “an eternal weight of glory.”

And now, dear child, as you have willingly accepted your illness, because it was God’s Will, strive in like manner to accept your recovery cheerfully, inasmuch as He wills you to recover. I cease not to pray, my dear child, that we may all be His without exception or reserve, in health and in sickness, in sorrow and in joy, in life and in death, in time and in Eternity. With all best wishes to your very filial heart, I am, yours, &c.

• Col. iii 3, 4.

C486.I I.XXX.