Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: INTRODUCTION. To some of us God has given, once in our lives, to know one of His hidden saints, and though, perhaps— life is so busy, we cannot always stop to learn the lessons it brings us—we have passed on unconscious or only half-conscious of the meaning of the gift, yet the time comes when we pause and find out what He has given us, and then perchance taken away. It is of one of these chosen souls, hidden, indeed, except to a privileged few, that the following sketch is written. To the little circle in which she lived, Clare Vaughan was in truth the bright moving example as she is now its most beloved memory. Many have done greater things for God in the world's sight, have striven and fought and conquered in harder fields of battle, and have found a far wider field for their activities. Hers was very small; she was hardly known outside the immediate circle of her friends and relations, and latterly to the Community of Poor Clares at Amiens. Of the outside world she knew nothing. For her it contained only one Object of interest, one Model for imitation—Jesus Christ. What He loved and came to save she also loved—sinners; and because He had " nothing to do with the world," without knowing it she hated it, and in this is contained the lesson of her life. Simple and unpretending as it was in other respects, it preached with a voice which never faltered the great truth which none can learn too quickly or too well, that there is in God's creation but one Object of love, which is Himself. He only is worthy of our hearts who made them; below, and at the root of everything else, there is ever " le vide et le neant," and no one could come in contact with Clare without learning something of this. She constrained people to love God better, she made them love the things she loved—s...