The priest, overcome by her importunity, consented, and wonderful to relate! the Blessed Sacrament no sooner touched her than it disappeared, and Juliana with joyful countenance gave up the ghost. After her death the form of a host was found stamped on her left side near her heart a proof that Our Lord had of Himself entered into her bosom, my God! Thou art not wont to work miracles, or to go beyond the established laws of nature, unless in special, extraordinary occasions where Thy honor and glory are concerned; it must then be most necessary for those who are dangerously ill to receive holy Communion, since Thou workest miracles to procure that favor for, them, and that, too, in the case of holy souls, who in their last illness seemed to have no reason to fear on account of past sins! And Thou must also have a special earnest wish and desire thus to visit Thy sick servants.
What love and condescension towards us poor mortals!
Oh, what love and condescension! What an emptying of Himslf, so to speak, on the part of Our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ! The world wonders when it reads in ecclesiastical and profane history of emperors, kings, and princes visiting and comforting the sick poor. Plutarch cannot give sufficient praise to Mark Antony because he felt the pulse of a wounded soldier and bound up his sores. Courtiers still wonder at the emperor Trajan, who used to visit his sick soldiers in the hospitals, and on one occasion, seeing that they had no linen, he pulled off his own imperial mantle and gave it to them to bind their wounds with. The humility and charity of Pope Paul II. are still held in great honor; he used to spend a great part of each day in visiting and consoling the sick poor. In the present gloriously reigning family of Austria it is still regarded as a sort of heirloom to observe the pious practice of accompanying the Blessed Sacrament if met with in the street; and emperors, kings, and queens of that family then go with it on foot, often even to the house of the sick person. But popes, kings, emperors of earth, what are ye compared to the supreme Monarch Jesus, whose vassals you are, and before whom you must humbly bend the knee? Yet He deigns to come in His own adorable person, as often as He is desired to do so, and to visit the sick and give them His own flesh and blood as their food and drink. Even the cabins of the poorest peasants, or the most wretched hovels, or even the stables in which the sick poor sometimes have to seek shelter, are not too lowly and abject for this great Monarch to enter,