But Thy Love and Thy Grace

Regina O'Connell is a poor factory girl whose slender earnings support herself and her bedridden sister. She is simplicity itself, one of those rare souls whose unselfishness and genuine humility make them heroines without anyone noticing. A weekly communicant, she is trying to follow the narrow path, but she cannot yet say from her heart the beautiful prayer of St. Ignatius: "Take, O Lord, all my liberty, my memory, my understanding, my whole will." She is tried, sore tried. When the pathos becomes almost unendurable, she learns her lesson at last: "Give me but Thy love and Thy grace, for these are sufficient." This slim, achingly tender tale shows how the small heroisms of the poor and humble can be as consequential as any battlefield. It is Catholic fiction at its most luminous, a story that proves holiness is not for the extraordinary but for those willing to love relentlessly in obscurity.