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 If the wicked do penance ... I will not remember all his iniquities. [18:21]

Let us conclude. Our sins, then, do not prevent us from becoming Saints; God offers us readily every assistance if we only desire it and ask it. What more remains? It remains for us to give ourselves entirely to God, and to devote to this love at least the remainder of our days in this life, Come, then, let us bestir ourselves; what are we doing? If we fail, we fail through ourselves, and not through God, Let us never be so unhappy as to turn all these mercies and loving calls of God into subjects of remorse and despair upon our death-bed, at that last moment when no more time is left to do anything; then the night sets in: The night cometh, when no man can work. [John 9:4] Let us recommend ourselves to the most holy Mary, who, as St. Germanus says, makes it her glory to turn the most abandoned sinners into Saints, by procuring for them the grace of conversion, not in an ordinary, but in an extraordinary degree; and this she is well able to do, because what she asks of Jesus Christ she asks as a Mother: "But thou, powerful with God by thy maternal authority, obtainest a wonderful grace of reconciliation for sinners, even for those who have sinned enormously;" and she herself encourages us in those words put into her mouth by the Holy Church: With me are riches ... that I may enrich them that love me; [Prov. 8:18] and elsewhere In me is all grace of the way and of the truth, in me is all hope of