If N. enters the novitiate I beg you to act with her like the prophet who adjusted himself to the body of the child he wished to revive. The duty of a mistress of novices is like that of a priest, to prevent girls from dying in their novitiate and if they are dead in their souls to revive them. To do that is to do the will of God. The Son of God said in the Gospel that he came into the world only to do the will of his father. It will be a considerable thing if you both do his will in different conditions.
You must resign yourself to suffer with a good heart what you still have not been able to correct two or three times. Prayers are as valuable as corrections. If you pray a little more than you correct for those who do not wish to believe you, you will correct them more easily.
The only way to correct ourselves from a fault is to humble ourselves because of it and to do it by practicing silence and tolerance with prayers in favor of those we would like to correct. If we are sometimes unsuccessful, we must recognize our failing and stand before God looking at him peacefully as if to show him our wound so that he may cure it. I admit that the fault is less when it comes as a surprise and by encountering some disorder. But we must strengthen ourselves against that in advance and ask God for grace for such occasions. I prepare myself like that for surprises that sometimes happen to me and these precautions are a great help to me when I am subject to them.
I believe God introduced this person in your religious community only to try the virtue of others. There slips into communities like yours grievous things like heresies in the church so that those who are approved by God may show themselves.
Do not put any other trouble in your omissions and negligences except to recognize them gently in yourself while amending them. When we do not trouble ourselves about a fault, it is a sign that we are humble and that we do not believe ourselves to be more than what we are.There is a scullery in the church which cleanses us from all the blotches that we acquire every day. Going to church once a week with the solid goal to do better and we come away entirely spotless. Nothing displeases me more than to see that we take too much trouble with our faults. The view alone that we have of them is enough before God in order to prevent that he attribute them to us, For me I act like that when it happens that I commit faults and I believe it would be a greater fault to trouble myself much about them. I look upon them in peace and leave them in my memory in order to consider them with the same humility and the same peaceful spirit when they show themselves to me. And then at the right time and with the conditions God gave me to live under, I wash myself clean of them in his scullery.
It will be necessary to say if the girl that you await develops well that God will have given her it by great round-about ways. We must admit that God is impenetrable in his judgements and that we must always serve him with fear and trembling and a great humility that does not allow us to be guaranteed anything from ourselves. How could we guarantee anything from another? I would experience a particular joy if he spreads his grace in that soul. You are more obliged than anyone else to behave well if you wish that God grants us the satisfaction that we desire in dealing with her.
It is remarkable that I have just this instant myself understood clearly that in a series of prayers and requests that I make every morning she is the first. I claim for this my sudden awareness only the effects of the eternal choice of God which have as a source the magnificence of this love that has for its object only the unworthiness of our soul and of our body. So because of that why should I care to lose hope worrying about some sin that has no notable mark and that perhaps I can attribute even to the choice of his will since his love makes it wrong for me to lose hope being a soul unworthy of love.
It is necessary that your whole community be in prayers every day at certain hours. Beyond that, you should choose two of the best who may be responsible for this plan at certain hours before the Blessed Sacrament. You must purify your community and live there better if possible than customary in order to draw the grace of God into this soul whom God sends you and confound the evil one who persecutes her. Tradidit illam Deus in manus. It is a sentence from Scripture, God delivered her into their hands.
Translated from the French by Daniel McNeill
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