tion, as well as Sta. Teresa de Jesus herself, left works adequately representative of the mystical asceticism of their day. Behind is a multitudinous company of volumes: St. Bridget of Sweden filled many in the fourteenth century; St. Mechtild2 (the saint whom German criticism has striven to identify with that Matilda of Dante's who gathering flowers by the clear stream has bewildered the commentators of the "Divine Comedy") wrote five books of spiritual grace; the Visions of B. Angela of Foligno, taken down by her confessor, also belong to the fourteenth century. Henry Suso was author of the "Book of the Everlasting Wisdom," as well as the author-or relator-of his "Life." St. Catherine of Siena dictated her "Ecstatic Dialogue." Juliana of Norwich, to cite those only whose works modern Catholicism has attempted to popularize, became likewise, though in different guise, what the monk Blosius denominates "a secretary of God." It is a literature full of monotonous repetitions, of raptures that by force of reiteration become the very platitudes of emotion; but full also of a fantastic human interest, of a distinctive beauty of coloring, of a shadowy delicacy of perception, and moreover it possesses not seldom "a miracle and passion" of thought that not even the barbarisms of language or the vapidity of modern translation can nullify.

gentle

don, 1874.

2

hands of her recent biographer, whose intimate knowledge of the time and country of which she writes lend a graphic vividness to her portrayal of the persons, scenes, and surroundings of that old Spanish world.

"On Wednesday, Day of San Bertoldi of the Order of Carmelites, on the 29th day of March, 1515, at five in the morning," so runs the brief entry found after her death in Teresa's breviary, "was born Teresa de Jesus, the sinner." Daughter of an illustrious race, Teresa spent her childhood in the city of Avila. The arms of dead soldiers of her blood carved on tombs, blazoned over gateways and arches, on church pillars and in stained windows, confronted her at every turn with memories of their past achievements and of the unforgotten traditions of their fame, as she grew up in the town set amid the wild sierras of Central Spain, where the sombre dignity of mediæval Gothic stonework was mingled with the grace of Moorish arabesque. At six years old she too is inspired with dreams of glory; she

Thinks it shame Life should so long play with that breath Which spent can buy so brave a death. Taking with her a like-minded childbrother, Teresa sets out for the land of the Moors, "that so," she tells the episode in the "life" written by herself, "we might be beheaded there." The child's play of martyrdom frustrated, it was succeeded by games of makebelieve hermitages built in her garden, where spiritual books are spelt over, and the refrain of eternity, "forever, forever, forever," is continually upon the lips of the two baby playmates. Thus, as in most such lives of the saints of Catholic medievalism, the gospels of holy childhoods, embroidered with many a fable and legend, are handed down to us by their grave chroniclers, possessing, like the

8 Visions and Instructions of B. Angela of Foligno (translated). London, 1871.

4 Dialogue of St. Catherine of Siena (translated). London, 1896.

charm that sets sober truth at defiance. Teresa's first childhood over, the page is varied with new imaginations. Chivalrous romances supersede

the blessed mother lay; immediately she surrendered her soul to God.

The well-known events of her life as one of the great monastic reformers are public property, and she takes her valiant place among the St. Francises, the St. Dominics, the Loyolas of the past ages, claiming the praise and dispraise, the love or enmity of men. It is needless here to review the familiar chronicle of Teresa's successes and failures, her triumphs and defeats in that vivid world of Philip II.'s reigna world of chivalry and enterprise and crime of the Holy Inquisition and of the massacres of Peru. It is with Teresa in her character, or the character ascribed to her, as a mystic; with that chapter of her personal experiences (limited, we are informed, to ten years of her later career), and with those pages of her writings that record and analyze those experiences, that we are concerned. As a mystic Teresa will probably live in the classification of the Church. Yet we are compelled to admit the truth of her latest biographer's repeated assertions-the Seraphic Doctor of Castile was not essentially or typically a mystic. Mysticism with her lacked somewhat, although it is difficult to define what it is that is absent. The vision of the mystic is there, but the eyes that see it are not the mystic's eyes, and, rapturous as may be the ecstasy of joy or suffering, we are still constrained to feel that it is not Teresa who is absorbed by the vision, but the vision that is absorbed by Teresa. Mysticism with her is rather an episode than a temperament. It is not the single-hearted, the single-aimed life of narrower or more passive natures, nor can we help being dimly aware that the brain was ever in some degree a spectator in that spiritual theatre where, by mystic rule, the soul alone might enter.

It is possible that outward circumstance had more than a little influence in determining the quality of her ecstasies. The story of Teresa's miraculous communications with the unseen

is a singular commentary on the popular belief that the visionary was at all costs and times a growth stimulated and encouraged by authoritative Catholicism, a belief at which Vaughan,1 or his Nonconformist conscience, connives. For a long seasonthe dates are indefinite-Teresa's visions were made the subject of incredulous scrutiny. Discountenanced alike by her most intimate friends and by her spiritual advisers, she was held at the bar of judgment. At that time, the period of her divine revelations, it would have taken but a hair's weight more of suspicion and the Inquisition would in all probability have claimed her for its prey, for the Church of that day was fully prepared to endorse the modern dictum that if the mystic of the East is always a slave, the mystic of the West is usually a rebel. Teresa's mind was tortured by the contagion of doubt and disparagement; while indomitably sincere to her perilous faith in herself, that faith became the faith of the accused, it lost its spontaneity, its freedom, and its simplicity. In the necessities of self-defence it became guarded, analytical and controversial; nor when adversaries were silenced and opponents convinced, is she left wholly victor of the field. Her own mind has played traitor and in part gone over to the enemy, nor to the very end are these doubts, ambushed in her own keen intelligence, cancelled. "That she was never entirely satisfied as to whether she was not deceiving herself is evident to any one who has read her 'Life' with an unbiassed mind. Her doubts as to whether these things were of divine or diabolical origin tormented her in life and were only stilled as she was nearing the grave," says her biographer, and, though possibly the statement is exaggerated, it seems on the whole just. As a hero, as a soldier, as even a humorist, her brilliant figure stands out, with beauty of body and beauty of soul, among the kings and courtiers, the saints and the sinners of her time. 1 Hours with the Mystics.

By all thy dow'r of lights and fires,
By all the eagle in thee, all the dove,
By all thy lives and deaths of love,
By thy large draughts of intellectual day,
And by thy thirsts of love more large than
they.

By all these things Teresa will be remembered when her mysticism is forgotten and out of mind. Teresa's own worus, spoken on death's threshold, prefigure the years to come with partial accuracy. "This 'Saint,'" she said, and aged, tired, and sick, her voice has its old ring of laughter, "will be no longer wanted." Of Teresa, as a mystic, the world truly, for loss or gain, has no need; and the world's memory knows what it wants, and for what it does not want it has a convenient trick of oblivion.

If the practical uses of mysticism may be traced in the records of Teresa's career, the scholarship, the intellectuality, the poetry of mysticism, found in the sensitive austerity of the humblest of saints, Teresa's greatest disciple, San Juan de la Cruz, its most passionate exponent. The Galahad of Monks, he celebrates the divine union of love in a hymn of almost unparalleled temerity in its adaptation of the language of human passion to the expression of the mysteries of the soul. Reading, we are not surprised to learn that the sordid persecutions, the bodily tortures inflicted upon him by unworthy brethren, imprisonments, scourgings, and disgrace, left his spirit serenely untroubled. Thrice only, amongst all the storms of his life, was he accused that he had sinned by discomposure. Once his humility rebelled against a painter who painted him by stealth; once, again, when a careless speaker had seemed to liken the poverty-loving Carmelite to the great Bridegroom of Poverty-St. Francis. The third occasion is unchronicled. The most compassionate of ascetics, it was said of him that his body "was the only creature of God to which he showed no mercy." Of all mystics, he represents perhaps most completely the extreme phase of the emancipation of the spirit from every

had

bond-more, from every faculty-of human nature. His is the mysticism of mysticism; the idea itself becomes but a symbol, the most abstract thought less than a metaphor, in relation to what lies behind it. Forms, figures, and natural apprehensions are but hindrances; in the "dark night" of the lonely soul (the phrase is old as mysticism itself) can the spirit alone attain illumination and achieve its brideship with the divine Bridegroom. It is the mysticism of the supreme surrender of self, with its supreme compensation-the "having nothing, and yet possessing all things."

But from the lives and works of the Teresas and San Juans, the leaders and marshals of the host, we turn instinctively to those less-known, lessremembered figures, who shared the conditions of that enigmatical spiritual life without participating in its renown. Contradictory as it may seem, the fame of the individual is apt to obscure, if not to pervert, our conceptions in the study of a type. The criticism of history has touched and retouched the outline of the features, partisan prejudice has alternately defaced and restored the original, shifting traditions have tinted and retinted its primary colors, and, perhaps, more than all those incidents of celebrity, we are dimly, but penetratingly, conscious, as we look on the portrait exhibited, of the eyes of the thousands who have gazed on it before, who gaze on it now; and in the sense of those thronging beholders we lose possession of that hermitage of thought in which surely the mind should dwell if it would appreciate the spirit of that mysticism whose birthplace was solitude, the profoundest solitude of all solitudes, the innermost cloister of the soul.

tic's life. Suso himself occupies a midway station between the two great phases of mysticism; that of the annihilation of human nature and that of its spiritualization. The outline of his external record is commonplace enough. Heinrich von Berg, known to the world by his mother's name Suess, Latinized Suso, to himself as Amandus (which name was revealed of God), was born at Ueberlingen, in the first year of the fourteenth century. The whole desire of his mother, we learn incidentally, was to live a spiritual life; but her husband was full of the world. Through this diversity shepossibly his father also-had much to suffer. At thirteen Heinrich entered a Dominican monastery, at eighteen he was "perfectly converted to God;" he became, finally, after enduring much suffering at the hands of his brethren in religion, prior of one of the communities of his order, and died at Ulm at the age of sixty-five. His "Life" was taken down from his own

relation by one of his spiritual daughters, and added to in later years by his own hand, curiously enough, in the name of the nun (Elizabeth Staglin) by whom the earlier portions had been inscribed.

His story lies in a sombre historic framework. A devotional world, mad with terror under the lash of plague and pestilence, was offering its holocausts of victims to superstitions which were the sacrilege of faith. A panic-stricken impulse to penitence had clothed itself in the grotesque masquerade of contrition-the rites of the Flagellants. Condemned by the more sober authorities of Church and State, they formed a vagrant pilgrim brotherhood, recruited from every sex and class. They passed from town to town, a dark train, blazoned with the red cross symbolic of propitiatory suffering, lacerating themselves on the highways, in the streets and marketplaces with the iron-pointed scourgethe badge and instrument of their confraternity-offering to the eyes fanatic mobs the spectacle of their self-inflicted tortures. The "Geissler

of

lied," the song of bloodshedding, rang through the lands they traversed.

Sinner, canst thou to Me aton. Three pointed nails, a thorny crown, The Holy Cross, a spear, a wound?

Miracles and crimes followed in their wake, the massacre of thousands of of this moral plague. Jews testified to the savage fierceness Amongst the slaughter

Christians the thirst for

spread like a fever, while amongst the rivalled the lust for blood. Meanwhile victims a thirst for martyrdom outthe undevotional world was peopled with apparitions, with phantasms of witchcraft and magic, and dominated by the shadowy imaginations of astrologers, soothsayers, and alchemists. In Suso's narrative the spirit of this century is pictured with a vividness and reality Froissart himself, his contemporary, does not surpass. Miracles occur the miracles of a period when men found belief in miracles more

easy of credence than belief in imposture, when every facility of deception existed in a life full of illusions, when the saint was as often the dupe of his disciples as the disciples of the saint, and common incidents and trivial accidents were seen and interpreted by those to whom the agency of the supernatural was a familiar key to all We follow enigmatical phenomena. Suso through scenes of peril and adventure told with the disjointed di rectness of a child's narrative,

and

more than once the incidents of the story recall the wanderings of Charles Reade's poor hero, the pious but timorous monk Gerard, of "The Cleister and the Hearth."