world and retired into the cloister for the enjoyment of ease and riches, but to practise poverty for the love of my Jesus, who for my sake became poorer than I am. When you are rebuked or treated with contempt, say: I have become a religious only to receive, and bear with patience, the humiliations due to my sins, and thus render myself dear to my divine Spouse, who was so much despised on earth. By this means you will live to God and die to the world. In conclusion, I recommend you frequently to ask yourself this question: What will it profit me to have abandoned the world, to have confined myself in the cloister, to have given up my liberty, if I do not become a saint; but if, on the contrary, I expose my soul to everlasting misery by a careless and tepid and negligent life?
V. The fifth means for a religious to attain sanctity is frequently to call to mind and to renew the sentiments of fervor and the desires of perfection which she felt when she first entered religion. The Abbot Agatho being once asked by a monk for a rule of conduct in religion, replied: " See what you were on the day you left the world, and persevere in the dispositions you then entertained." Remember, O consecrated virgin, the resolutions which you made on the day you retired from the world, to seek nothing but God; to have no will but his, and to suffer all manner of contempt and hardship for the love of Jesus Christ. This thought, as we learn from the Lives of the Fathers, brought back to his first fervor a young monk who had fallen into tepidity. When he first determined to retire into a monastery, his mother strongly opposed his design, and endeavored by various reasons to show that it was his bounden duty not to abandon her. To all her arguments he replied:
