Let me give you another example of fortitude, which you can perhaps better appreciate. Some few years since, in England, there was a young lady of noble family, and of very attractive manners, who became a Religious in a convent near the town where I then resided. { 248} To please her father, she had, for several years past, attended the numerous parties that were given among her circle of acquaintance. Her presence was always thought to be a great acquisition. But all the while, her heart was in religion. She longed for the time when her father would yield, and allow her to try her vocation within a convent's walls. At last, he did; but what was his grief when he found that she had chosen one of the most austere orders in the church. She wished to become a Poor Clare. Now, you may not know that a Poor Clare never leaves the walls of her convent; she never sees any one; she walks bare-footed; she uses the painful discipline, and spends many hours of the dead of the night in prayer, while the outer world is asleep. Here, then, was a young girl who had been brought up in luxury, entering at once upon a life of the greatest severity. When I last heard of her, which was a long time after she had entered this convent, she was said to be as merry as a cricket, and the life of her convent, as she had formerly been of her parties of pleasure. { 249} Now, how shall we account for such fortitude as this? I will tell you. It was our Lord in her heart, where she had made Him a home, that gave her the courage and strength she needed to comply with his call to her, to be a spouse of his. That became easy to her, which her relatives and friends could not comprehend. There is no one who can do any thing great for God, without this interior life. I will say even more than this; neither she nor any other member of a religious community, can hope to persevere in any well-regulated convent, on any other ground than this. With this, any one, whether in religion or in the world, can trample underfoot the difficulties and trials peculiar to their state of life.
God offers us this interior life, on two conditions. In the first place, we must be in the state of grace. One must first be introduced to a man, before he can become his personal friend. A man in mortal sin is as though he did not know God. He needs to make his acquaintance. He is in a condition that is even worse than that of a stranger; he is God's enemy, and he must be first reconciled.