The Marian Garden: Ancient and New

Spring water, and miraculous wells.

§. 2.

1. The infinite goodness of God in all His creatures, even the inanimate ones, continuously works great miracles for the common salvation of His faithful, just as I shall now recount regarding the element of water. In our Holy Hermitage of Mount Senario (from which place our Religion draws its origin, and in which, besides the seven first Blessed Fathers, many other men of great sanctity have lived, and even now the Fathers and Brothers of our Order lead an eremitical life), in that Hermitage of ours, I say, our Holy Father Philip spent the time of his novitiate with the harshest penance in that cave which exists to this day, and in which, to show that this penance was most acceptable to Him, God miraculously caused a spring to gush forth from the living rock, converting the most devout tears shed there by this holy man into a sort of perpetual spring. Regarding the water of this spring, a multitude of those suffering from fevers and other diseases send for it from Florence and elsewhere to be drawn; if one drinks it, he recovers the desired health, besides other miracles that have followed there, as can be seen in Century 1, Book 2, Chapter 18.

2. The same Blessed Servant of Mary, Philip, most studious of humility, when he had been proposed for Supreme Pontiff by the Cardinals gathered at Viterbo, Clement IV having died, and having learned of this, he fled and withdrew into the solitude of Mount Tuniati, and there for some time remained unknown in continuous and holy meditations. And upon his departure, through his prayers, he obtained from the Lord God that salutary waters should gush forth for the healing of every kind of disease, which he himself, like another Moses, elicited from the hard rock with three strikes of his staff, which are still called to this day the Baths of Saint Philip. Century 1, Book 5, Chapter 16