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This desire was great and continuous, but grew much
more, when the First Truth showed her the neediness
of the world, and in what a tempest of offense
against God it lay. And she had understood this the
better from a letter, which she had received from the
spiritual Father of her soul, in which he explained
to her the penalties and intolerable dolor caused by
offenses against God, and the loss of souls, and the
persecutions of Holy Church.
All this lighted the fire of her holy desire with
grief for the offenses, and with the joy of the
lively hope, with which she waited for God to provide
against such great evils. And, since the soul seems,
in such communion, sweetly to bind herself fast
within herself and with God, and knows better His
truth, inasmuch as the soul is then in God, and God
in the soul, as the fish is in the sea, and the sea
in the fish, she desired the arrival of the morning
(for the morrow was a feast of Mary) in order to hear
Mass.
And, when the morning came, and the hour of the Mass,
she sought with anxious desire her accustomed place;
and, with a great knowledge of herself, being ashamed
of her own imperfection, appearing to herself to be
the cause of all the evil that was happening
throughout the world, conceiving a hatred and
displeasure against herself, and a feeling of holy
justice, with which knowledge, hatred, and justice,
she purified the stains which seemed to her to cover
her guilty soul, she said: "O Eternal Father, I
accuse myself before You, in order that You may
punish me for my sins in this finite life, and,
inasmuch as my sins are the cause of the sufferings
which my neighbor must endure, I implore You, in Your
kindness, to punish them in my person."
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