who led them in the paths of the Lord; all these lived amid the peace of solitude, and in the protecting shade of some monastery; while this worthy daughter of Abraham was neither in a convent nor in the wild, but in the bosom of her family, without the help of spiritual direction, and surrounded by obstacles of every sort; and yet she attained a degree of abstinence that no Saint besides had ever attained. True, Moses fasted twice during a period of forty days; Elias did it once, and the Gospel teaches us that the Saviour deigned to give us the same example, but these are not fasts during consecutive years. When John the Baptist was conducted by the spirit of God into the wilderness, it is written, that his food was the locust and wild honey; but this was not an absolute fast; there is none but St. Magdalen of whom history and not the Gospel, writes that she fasted during thirty-three years on a rock which is still pointed out, and therefore we may conclude, that the holy examples I have cited give us to understand with what magnificence, and inexhaustible bounty, God enriches his saints and bestows on them new perfections. They should also prove the admirable virtue of Catharine, and that the Church may say of her, without injury to her other saints: "We find none like her!" Non est inventus similis illi. The infinite power of Him who sanctifies souls, can give them, when it seems to him good, a particular glory.
One more fact will recapitulate all I have said of Catharine, and will give you to comprehend to what point she had weakened her body and subjected her mind. Her mother informed me that her daughter, before her penances, possessed such physical strength, that she could easily take on her shoulders a weight sufficient
