forbore to cut his nails. He begged his food, and would eat no meat and drink no wine, except a little on Sundays and feast days. These bodily privations disturbed his mental equilibrium, and distressful thoughts tormented him. At one time, he was troubled by fears lest he should be unable to endure for long this mode of life that led, as he believed, to holiness; at another, he felt no joy in prayer or in the office of the mass; and then, on a sudden, "as if he had dropped his cloak," his heart felt light again. But more often deep depression prevailed. His heart dried up; bitterness and tedium lodged in it. Then, after a time, like a flood of sunshine, joy would spread over his soul, but only to subside again in darkness. Gladness and grief alternated like day and night. His mind teemed with doubts and scruples. Had he really, in that long confession before his vigil, recounted every sin and fault, or had he held something back? If his sins had been absolved why was he so troubled? At times he would weep for hours, and cry to God for mercy, and repeat over and over St. Paul's words: "O wretched man that I am! who shall deliver me from the body of this death?" Suicide flashed across his mind.

In his castings about for relief, he remembered to have read how some saint, in order to obtain a favor from God, had fasted until the favor had been granted, and he determined to do the same. He went out of town privily to a chapel dedicated to Our Lady and spent a week without a mouthful of food, still keeping to his three flagellations a day and seven hours of prayer. His absence was discovered, and pious ladies of the town, among whom he had many friends, went forth in search and brought him back. His fast had lasted from Sunday to Sunday, and he would have still persisted, but that his confessor, under penalty of refusing absolution, commanded him to eat. So he ate, and for two days felt much better; on the third day, however, a relapse came and the black thoughts rushed back. But now his mind was clear enough to perceive that all these perturbations had been the Devil's doing in order to turn him from his purpose, and at this discovery peace and consolation descended upon him in wonderful abundance.

Nevertheless, scruples still dogged him. For instance, when he went to bed, spiritual joy gushed up within him, and was so grateful and comforting that he lay awake with the pleasure of it, and had little time left for sleep; but without sleep he found himself ill prepared next day for his duties, and, therefore, he denied himself his spiritual reveries. Years afterwards, at the university, he learned a similar lesson, that he must not let meditation or prayer cut into the time that should be spent in preparation for lectures; for a man's business is to do his allotted task and he must not permit even the highest spiritual joy to hinder him. At length he passed into a season of peace and happiness; he felt that God was dealing with him, as a schoolmaster deals with a little child, proceeding step by step, always proportioning the child's task to his strength, and not passing on to the next lesson until the last had been mastered.

Writers on mysticism, familiar with the recorded experiences of saints and visionaries, usually describe the course of their singular psychical phenomena as taking place very much in the same general way. First comes conversion, that is complete surrender to an imperious impulse to abandon the world. Next follows the purgative way, in which purification is partly voluntary and partly not. The repentant man by means of prayer, meditation, scourging and privation, strives to wash from his soul the stains of sin; and, as if physical pain were not enough, black thoughts not of his willing crowd upon his spirit. But after repentance, discipline and mental torment have cleansed the soul, then the grace of God descends upon her in blessings,

A thousand liveried angels lackey her

And in clear dream and solemn vision

Tell her of things that no gross ear can hear.

This stage is called the illuminative way. Loyola trod it; so did the two famous figures in Spanish religious history who came after him, St. Theresa and St. John of the Cross. They have left of their spiritual experiences a far fuller

record than any that we possess from him. What they tell at great length enables us to fill in and round out the condensed narrative of Loyola's mystical experiences. And if in these three saints we find the language that they speak, their symbols, their emblems and their imagery, alien to our thought, or outside the pale of our sympathy, hard even to understand, then we must translate their visions and ecstasies, as we do their Spanish words, into such figures and symbols as shall represent for us, with our different education, this trudging up the purgatorial hill by passionate souls, and their solemn delight at beholding gleams of divine splendor on the summit far above them.

Cardinal Newman in hitting off three types of spiritual life, says that St. Benedict represents the poetical, St. Dominic the scientific, and St. Ignatius Loyola the practical. And Loyola was practical, very practical, in that he set before himself a definite plan for the salvation of men, and in order to execute that plan busied himself with social, political and ecclesiastical forces, and studied his disciples as an artisan studies his tools, so that he was able to use them with nice discrimination, setting each to the particular task for which his character or talents fitted him. That, however, is but one side of the man; the other is this passionate, mystical side, upturned to God, losing itself in visions beatific. Supernormal sights appeared to Loyola all his life, but it was at this time that they played their formative part in his spiritual education. Some of them I shall describe. They were all fashioned out of images and ideas familiar to Catholic teaching, set forth, that is, in the pictorial language with which he was familiar, hieroglyphics of medieval spiritual life.

Once, while on his knees in prayer to the Virgin, his soul was lifted up, and he beheld, as if with his corporal eyes, an image of the Trinity. He was so moved by this that even after he had gone to table he could not keep back the tears; he talked of nothing else, and expounded the blessed mystery with comparisons and instances in so manifold a fashion, that all who heard him were carried away by admiration. Not satisfied with telling of it, he com

posed a little book of eighty pages about it; and all his life the vision endured fresh and vivid in his memory. And whenever he prayed to the Trinity, he was conscious of a singular sweetness. In another vision he grasped intellectually how and in what manner God had created the world; • but this he could not recount in words. As Dante says

il mio veder fu maggio

che il parlar nostro ch'a tal vista cede.

My vision was greater than our speech

Which quails before such seeing.

And again, during mass, with the eyes of the spirit he beheld the Lord Jesus Christ, very God and very man, present in the host. Often-and this happened to him also later, at Jerusalem, Padua, and various places he saw a vague shape without members in a luminous body (so he described it) our humanity in the divine person of God the Son. Visions of the Blessed Virgin were also vouchsafed to him. These divine revelations filled his soul with celestial light, and established his faith in such certitude that he was ready to die for it; and, as he used to say, if the Bible were to be lost, he could teach the divine mysteries from his knowledge of them got in this vision, so deeply engraven were they on his heart.

But of all these experiences the most memorable was that which occurred while he was walking along the bank of the river Cardona on his way to a chapel, a mile out of the town. He had sat down looking toward the water. While he sat there, the eyes of his understanding were opened. It was not a visual experience, but he was conscious of a comprehension, an intellectual revelation, concerning spiritual matters that touch faith and Holy Writ, vivid beyond all comparison with what he had known or understood before, so that it all seemed quite new. His mind was so illuminated thereby that he seemed to himself to have become another man and to possess another understanding. He was never able to recount this revelation with any particularity; all he could say (as he did late

in life) was that his understanding had received a great light, and that if he were to take and put together all other gifts of help and succour that he had received from God in all his years, their total sum would not make up the equivalent of what he had received in that one experience.

One other psychical experience remains to be told. It rests upon good evidence although Ignatius himself never mentioned it. He was naturally reserved. Father Polanco, the earliest disciple to write his life, says: "Erat in suis rebus communicandis difficilis"; the reason was that his modesty forbade him to reveal many strange happenings which he believed were special favors from God. I quote Father Ribadeneira:

One Saturday at the hour of compline Ignatius fell down in a trance. A great number of men and women beheld him, and were about to make preparations for disposing of his dead body, when one of them noticed that his heart was still beating, though faintly. This extraordinary condition lasted until the next Saturday at the same hour. Then, in the presence of several people who were keeping watch, Ignatius opened his eyes, and, as if awakening from a sweet sleep, said with love in his voice: "Ah! Jesus." This I had from persons present; for the blessed father never spoke of it to my knowledge, hiding in silent humility this great act of God's grace.

Doña Isabel Roser, a lady of Barcelona who knew Ignatius well afterwards, also told Father Ribadeneira that eye witnesses had recounted the same story to her; and Juan Pascual, son of Inés Pascual, also told Ribadeneira that he was present, being then sixteen or seventeen years old, and that when he saw Ignatius in this state he ran to his mother calling out, "Mother! the saint is dead."

These ecstasies, visions and other emotional experiences were primarily due, unless we accept a mystical or supernatural explanation, to the weakness of his poor, ill-treated, underfed body; but that they dealt with heaven and things