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 no clothes at all! Then a narrow manger held His infant limbs; now deprived of all His worldly goods, He has, in all the world which He created, no place to lay His Head except His Cross; for a& He came into the world poor and needy, so now He willed to leave it naked and an outcast. At His birth He was tightly wrapped in swaddling clothes; at His death He is pierced by lance and nails. The thought of so great misery calls surely for compassion; the showing forth of so great patience calls surely for imitation. Be thou, then, more patient than ever before, when things that seem needful to thee are taken from thee, or when things upon which thou hast set thy heart are denied thee. Learn to do with little, and to be content with what is mean and poor; so shalt thou be kept from grumbling, and shalt have peace in thyself, and favour with Almighty God.

O that I could possess, or could devoutly touch or kiss, even one small piece of those sacred garments of Jesus, my Lord, from whence so often went out such great virtue that the sick were healed thereby! How holy are the relics of those garments, and in what veneration should they be held, wherever they are to be found! Truly, if those soldiers had but known their worth, they would never, in their greed, have cut them up, or sold them for some mere trifle; but rather would most carefully, and with due reverence, have preserved them in caskets of silver; for they were indeed more precious than all the royal mantles of kings, and all the robes of bishops, nor has any metal been found so precious as to deserve to be compared with them. But their sanctity and high distinction were hidden from those ungodly men, whose anxiety to satisfy their greedy thirst for gain