My very dear Sister, you are right to praise God and rejoice, in whatever state you are in, because of the grace he has given you by making you see the last of your five daughters also take the veil of Novice at Port-Royal. If it happened only as it usually happens, your joy would be less. But it happened with proofs that God prepared for salvation all five of them with his Spirit and his graces and that he submitted them all instantaneously to his domination. Your joy should be extraordinary and you should admire the liberalities that God has granted you. For I know few mothers who can say what you can say in particular about all your daughters. I believe I should aid you to return thankfulness to God by alerting you to the magnitude of his grace. If it had been confined to your daughters alone, it would still be out of the ordinary, there being no one in Paris towards whom God has acted in this special way. But when I see that the eldest of your children, Robert, also participates in this grace and that your last son, Antoine, who seems to be the least has become the greatest using in his religious writings the two gifts that God has given him of science and piety, I see that nothing is missing from your present happiness.
You know that you often told me that you love your children only for heaven. According to your wishes, I took trips to visit Antoine in order to draw the blessings of heaven to him and win him over completely for God. When you were thinking the least about his conversion and I also, God gave him to the influence of your prayers and God wished that I also had a part in his wonderful change even though I was absent when it happened. What does it mean except that God wishes to make you happy and content in this world before your death?
This does not include yet my saying anything about your present relationships with your daughters since you have also as a widow taken the veil of a Novice at Port-Royal. They have become by a marvelous change your Sisters and one, Agnes, as the Abbess of Port-Royal, has become your Mother. In addition, she takes the place for you of heaven where the holy virgin Mary, who was Mother of her Son on earth has become his daughter and he her Father by the glory that he gave her, a glory made possible by the mystery of the Holy Trinity which makes the Son fully equal to the Father. It was a spiritual generation as was the divine generation by which the Virgin Mary gave birth to God the Father in the form of God the Son. It is a change of names which should fill your heart with devotion and provide you with an interior conversation until the day when it will please God to call you to go thank him in the language of the angels for so many favors that he has rarely given to mothers in this world.
I am sure that your admiration was doubled when you saw that under the government of your daughters, Part-Royal has entered into the spirit of poverty without which religions are almost nothing except vain appearances of piety. It must be a great satisfaction for you to be able to live as a true Christian as Jesus Christ lived and to not be religious in appearance but in spirit and truth. You can in the future live in this monastery as in a house of God with the same expectation as Simeon lived in Jerusalem and say with him when Christ will be present for the last time between your arms and in your mouth, his last words: now you will take away, my lord, your servant, according to the word you gave him. For what is admirable and of a great consolation, Jesus Christ will extend to each Christian who will have waited for him what he had promised to Simeon, to come to him in his person and in his body of glory and not of death a little before his last moment. This makes us see that the whole short form of Christian devotion boils down to live waiting for the coming of Jesus Christ and that the Patriarchs and the Prophets had no other object at all before the birth of Jesus except to wait for him with the peace and silence of the spirit.
Translated from the French by Daniel McNeill
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