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From her entrance to the Benedictine abbey of Helfta near Eisleben in Saxony, as a child of four in 1260, until her twenty-sixth year, Gertrude lived what she was later to consider a lax and worldly life, following the monastic observance outwardly, but applying her brilliant mind and boundless enthusiasm to secular studies. Then, when she was twenty-five, all was changed. The Lord appeared to her in the form of a beautiful youth inviting her to a conversion of life and to close union with himself. Thenceforth for Gertrude God was all, and her neighbor all in God, and she flung herself into his service with the same wholeheartedness which she had previously brought to her secular studies. She was continually granted extraordinary mystical favors, including an intense awareness of God's loving presence in her soul; and despite her great humility and consequent reluctance she understood that she had been granted these graces for the good of others and was therefore required to make them known.