[Meditationes seu Contemplationes devotissimae]

of baptism, consecrating it so that anyone who wished to be baptized in the name of the Lord would be purified not so much by the water of the world as by the wave of Christ. Therefore, the Savior willed to be baptized, not to acquire cleanliness for Himself, but to cleanse the currents for us. Furthermore, faithful soul, mark this: that Christ, being baptized, saw the Holy Spirit descending upon Him and heard the voice of the Father confessing Him to be His Son, and saw the heaven opened. Do not understand it as if the Son did not have all these things before His baptism, but so that He might show what the sacrament of baptism is worth. For the Trinity appeared in baptism so that everyone might know what they receive in baptism. For then, each one, with the filth of sins washed away, receives the Holy Spirit, where he begins to be a son of God through the grace of adoption, where then the door of the kingdom of heaven is opened to him, and he is made a partaker of the entire fatherland and of the holy angels. Therefore, strive, faithful soul, that you do not block for yourself the door of the heavenly fatherland, which has been divinely opened for you by human mysteries, through your own allurements.

Concerning Christ's forty-day fast and His temptation by the devil

O stupendous are your works, Lord!
You fasted, good Jesus, for forty days
and forty nights, not indeed out of an anxious
necessity to repress some vices of the mind, or
to curb the flesh—which rebels against the
spirit—by the roughness of fasting, for these
things have no place in the most holy mind of
the Holy One, nor can they have. But you did
so to macerate your innocent flesh for us out
of immense charity, and so that you might provide
an example of fasting to the faithful, and
instruct them how good fasting is and what
a shield it is against the devil. But, most
sweet Jesus, after the celebrated fast, when
you had received hunger into our infirmity,
you permitted yourself to be tempted by the
devil for that cause of piety, that you might
instruct us how we might overcome the
temptations of the devil—which especially
infest holy men—by your example and
doctrine. For in all these things there is a
reason for our salvation. You indeed are hungry
for us, you speak for us. We conquer by the
mind because we are when we are to be
purified by you. For who could thwart the
only-begotten of the Father, to whom no
creature could offer resistance, in order to
enter into the struggle for our sake?
Therefore, faithful souls, because we have
acknowledged the victories of the fasting Lord
as the triumph of our salvation, let us
sanctify our fasts with religious services.
But what else is it to sanctify a fast than,
while fasting, to desire to do just things
and to avoid iniquitous ones?