things while in those ecstasies, and she sometimes expressed during them most sublime truths.
I saw her one day ravished out of her senses, and I heard her speaking in an under-tone; I approached her and heard her perfectly say in Latin " Vidi arcana Dei," "I saw the secrets of God," she added nothing to this phrase, but continually repeated, "I saw the secrets of God." Long after, when she was restored to herself she still repeated the same words; I wished to know why: "Mother," said I, to her, "why pray, do you constantly repeat the same words, and not explain them to us by speaking to us as usual." " It is impossible for me," said she "to say anything else, or to say it otherwise." "But why ? you are accustomed to tell as what God has revealed to you, when we do not interrogate you, why do you decline answering, when we inquire of you." "I should reproach myself," said she to me, " in undertaking to express to you what I saw, as guilty of vain words: it seems to me that I should blaspheme God and dishonor him by my language. The distance is so broad between what my spirit contemplated, when ravished in God, and whatever I could describe to you, that I should think that I was falsifying, in speaking to you of them. I must therefore not attempt their description; all that I can say is, that I saw ineffable things!"
It was quite natural that Providence should unite Catherine and Mary Magdalen by the ties of mother and daughter, because they so resembled each other in their fast, their love and in their contemplations, When Catherine spoke of this favor, she merely said, that a sinner had been given for daughter, to a saint that had formerly sinned, so that the mother, by remembering the frailty of nature, and God's plentiful mercy, might compassionate
