"It is necessary to be dead to everything, and after that to await everything; such was the motto of her inward life and of the constant effort made by this impassioned soul, susceptible of all tender affections, to detach herself violently and irrevocably from earth.

The instinct of command, loftiness and breadth of views, find their place with the holy priest and with the nun; the mind of M.de St.Cyran was less practical and his judgment less simple than that of the abbess, habituated as she had been from childhood to govern the lives of her nuns as their conscience.

A reformer of more than one convent since the day when she had closed the gates of Port-Royal against her father, M.Arnauld, in order to restore the strictness of the cloister, Mother Angelica carried rule along with her, for she carried within herself the government, rigid, no doubt, for it was life in a convent, but characterized by generous largeness of heart, which caused the yoke to be easily borne.
"To be perfect, there is no need to do singular things," she would often repeat, after St.Francis de Sales; "what is needed is to do common things singularly well!" She carried the same zeal from convent to convent, from Port-Royal des Champs to Port-Royal de Paris; from Maubuisson, whither her superiors sent her to establish a reformation, to St.Sacrement, to establish union between the two orders; ever devoted to religion, without having chosen her vocation; attracting around her all that were hers; her mother, a wife at twelve years of age, and astonished to find herself obeying after having commanded her twenty children for fifty years; five of her sisters; nieces and cousins; and in "the Desert," beside Port-Royal des Champs, her brothers, her nephews, her friends, steeped like herself in penitence.

Before her, St.Bernard had "dispeopled the world " of those whom he loved, by an error common to zealous souls and exclusive spirits, solely occupied with thoughts of salvation.

Even in solitude Mother Angelica had not found rest.