brace, neither has there been any sorrow for which it has not won consolation, nor any temptation which it has not merited grace to overcome. Souls who will not pray for themselves, who stand on the verge of eternal ruin, are snatched from the edge of the precipice by the graces that they owe to the prayer which the Divine Solitary of Nazareth offered up for them, whilst the sweat ran down His face as He toiled, or as He knelt through the silence of the night, praying with *a strong cry and tears, and was heard for His reverence' (Heb. v. 7).
"When souls who are thus called to the contemplative life increase in the love of God, there springs up spontaneously within their breast a desire to promote His interests, and then it is that the memory of Nazareth sheds itself over them as a ray of light, indicating the infallible means by which alone they can attain the end desired.
"Prayer and penance, the daily mortification of a common life, subject to all kinds of restraint and subjection, a life wherein self-will can have no part — such are the arms whereby contemplatives fight the battles of the Lord, battles ignored indeed by the world, but well known to God and to His angels.
"It was, then, a loving design of His Providence by which God provided for the souls, above described, a means by which they could at once follow the tendency He Himself had given them towards solitude passed in His presence, and in labor for the interests of His glory. Happy, then, are those Religious, set apart from all others for the mission of prayer and reparation, to whom has also been given a particular drawing towards meditation on the hidden life of Jesus. It will present to them a mirror wherein they may behold the characteristic features of their own daily life in the perfection to which it was raised in Jesus. They will have but to turn their mental vision to Nazareth in order to
