CHAPTER XLII.

What sufferings are the most useful to men, and bring most glory to God?

THE holy daughter asked him, saying:—I would gladly know what kind of sufferings are, above all others, most useful to men, and bring most glory to God. He answered as follows:—Thou must know that there are many kinds of sufferings by which a man is disciplined and set forward on the road to bliss, if only he can use them rightly. Sometimes God sends heavy sufferings on a man without any fault of his, either to try how firm he stands, or to show him what he is in himself, as we often read in the Old Testament; or, again, merely to manifest His own glory, as is related in the Gospel about the man born blind whom Christ the Lord declared to be without fault, and restored to sight.

On the other hand, there are some sufferers who well deserve their sufferings, as the thief did who was crucified with Christ the Lord, 218and to whom Christ gave everlasting bliss be cause of his true conversion to Him amid his sufferings. There are others, again, who are guilt less in regard to the particular thing for which they are at the moment suffering, but yet there is something else faulty in them, on account of which God makes them suffer; just as it often happens that Almighty God crushes haughty arrogance, and brings persons of this description to themselves by letting their pride and superciliousness meet with a heavy fall in things in which, perhaps, they are wholly and entirely free from guilt. Again, God sometimes sends sufferings upon men out of special love for them, to save them in this way from a still greater suffering, as is the case with those to whom God gives their purgatory in this life by sicknesses, poverty, or such like, that so they may be delivered from sufferings in the life to come; or with those whom He permits to be tried and exercised by fiendish men, that they may thus be saved from the sight of the foul fiend at death. There are others also who suffer from burning love, like the martyrs, whose joy it was by the manifold deaths, whether of body or soul, which they endured, to show forth to the dear God their love.

Besides all this, we find in this world many sufferings which are vain and without consolation; such, for example, as are undergone by those who make it their aim to please the world in worldly things. These persons purchase hell at a very dear price, while, on the contrary, those who suffer for God find help in their tribulations. Again, there are some persons who are often inwardly admonished by God to give themselves to Him without reserve, because He wishes to admit them to His intimacy. Now if they resist the call through negligence, God draws them to Him by sufferings; and to whichever side they turn in their endeavours to escape Him, the faithful God sends upon them temporal misfortunes and discomfort, and thus holds them by the hair, that they cannot get away from Him.

There are many others also to be met with who have no sufferings except those which they make for themselves, by estimating too highly what is not worthy of being taken into account at all. Once when a man who was heavily laden with afflictions chanced to pass by a certain house, he heard a woman within uttering very great lamentations. The thought came to him:—Go in and comfort the woman in her 220sufferings. Accordingly he went in and said:—Dear lady, what has happened to you, that you are bewailing yourself thus? She answered:—I have let a needle drop, and cannot find it any where. He turned round, and thought to himself as he went out:—O foolish woman, if thou hadst my burden on thee thou wouldst not weep for a needle! In this way some soft-natured persons make for themselves sufferings in a multitude of things where there is nothing to suffer.

But the noblest and best kind of suffering is after the pattern of Christ’s sufferings I mean those which the heavenly Father gave to His only-begotten Son, and which He still gives to His dear and chosen friends. This must not be taken as if any one were altogether without fault, except indeed the dear Jesus Christ, who never sinned; but it is to be understood of the example of patience which Christ gave us when He bore Himself in His sufferings like a gentle little lamb among wolves. Hence it is that He sometimes gives great sufferings to some of His dear and chosen friends, that we, who are so impatient under suffering, may learn patience from these blessed men, and in every case by sweetness of heart to overcome evil with good. All 221this thou shouldst consider, my daughter, and be ready to suffer without reluctance; for from whatever quarter sufferings come they can be turned to profit, if only the sufferer accepts them all as sent by God, and refers them back again to God, and so gets the mastery over them with His help.

The daughter answered:—The noblest kind of suffering, of which you spoke last, I mean when a person suffers innocently, is the lot of few. Therefore I would gladly hear how those who for their sins have deserved to suffer can r by God’s help, come forth victorious from their sufferings; for such persons have a twofold source of pain:—they have angered the Almighty God, and they are tormented from without.

He replied:—I will tell you. I knew a man who, whenever he fell into a sin through human frailty, used to do like a good washerwoman, who takes the clothes, when she has steeped and softened them, to the pure spring, and there by washing makes every thing clean and fresh which before was dirty. Even so this man would never rest until some of the innocent, clown-trickling Blood of Christ, which the Lord shed with unspeakable love, that it might be a help and comfort to all sinners, had been spiritually poured 222forth in sufficient measure upon him: and in this hot Blood he washed himself and all his stains away, and he bathed himself in the healthful brook of Blood as a little child is bathed in a warm water-bath; and this he did with heart felt devotion in a well-grounded Christian faith that this Blood must and would wash away all his sins, and cleanse him from all guilt by its almighty power. In this way, however things might be, whether he was guilty or free from guilt, he always referred them ultimately to the good God.