Page:Zawis and Kunigunde (1895).djvu/162

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158
MARTYRDOM

hearts with that origin of power and love which thus sacredly conjoins heaven and earth. Not in ascetic annihilation of the graces God had given, not in absorbed abstraction that abandons all human sympathies, not in immured exile from the love and sympathy that exalts humanity by partaking of its daily sorrows, and imparting its sanctified discipline in the love and care of conjugal life, the patience of parental endurance, and the calm forbearance among provocations in our chequered life, did our revered friends exhibit their love for their human kindred, their devotion to divine progress in grace, and nearness to the essence of the pure source of all good. Such gifts as they possessed they devoted to the service of their fellows.

“Dutiful and loving children, affectionate and in all honor as husband and wife; and earnest in daily avocations of useful industry in sympathy with men and women, their fidelity is a demonstration of the presence of a divine spirit; and their death leaves an inheritance of love for suffering humanity that never can depart from the earth. Of the generous and devoted sister who sacrificed herself in the very flames to perform a work of love, my knowledge is that even the affliction of leprosy could not extinguish from her soul that abnegation of self in discharge of the duty she felt prompted to perform that marks the highest advance in divine things. An outcast among men, a wanderer and an object of loathing, she performed an act of sublime charity that ought to put to eternal shame the real instigators of these barbari-