with him a companion who was young and a good walker. Now, it happened one day he could not keep up with his swift companion, for he had become very tired and ill, and in consequence the companion had gone ahead of him. The Servitor looked back to see if any one was following in whose company he might go through the forest, at the skirts of which he had arrived, for it was late in the day. The forest, moreover, was of il repute, for many persons had been murdered in it. The Servitor therefore waited to see if any one was coming. man. At length two persons approached at a very rapid pace, the one a young and pretty woman, the other a tall ferociouslooking man, carrying a spear and a long knife. The Servitor was struck with dread at the terrible appearance of the He thought within himself, "O, Lord! what kind of people are these! How am I to go through this great forest, and how will it fare with me?" Then he made the sign of the cross over his heart and ventured it. When they were already deep in the forest, the woman came to him and asked him who he was. As soon as he had told she said, "Dear sir, I know you well by name. I pray you hear my confession. . . . Alas, worthy sir, it is with sorrow I tell you my sad lot. Do you see the man who follows us? He is by trade a murderer, and he murders people here in this wood. He never spares any one. He has deceived me and carried me off, and I am forced to be his wife." The Servitor was so terrified by these words that he nearly fainted, and he cast a very sorrowful look all round if haply there were any mode of escape; but there was no one to be seen or heard in the dark forest except the murderer. Then he thought within himself, "If, weary as thou art, thou triest to flee, he will soon overtake and kill thee; if thou criest out, no one will hear, and death again will be thy lot." He looked upwards very wofully, and said, "O, my God! what is to become of me? O, death, how nigh thou art!" When the woman had finished confess ing, she went back to the murderer and besought him privily, saying, "Come now, dear friend, go forward and make thy confession also, for it is a pious belief that whoever confesses to him will never be abandoned by God. . . .” other the Servitor's terror knew no So the story is told, and strange above all its incongruities of realism is the fact that this frightened monk, whose fear of death is confessed with such perfect simplicity, is the same who narrates with equal simplicity the details of his self-inflicted tortures of twenty-two years of perpetual penance! Their very recital sickens the imagination as he tells how, with ingenious device, he made each hour an unrelenting martyrdom, until macerated and enfeebled, when nothing remained except to die, God bade him leave this "lower school of detachment" and live to endure the sharper pains of soul and heart in "Hitherto thou hast store for him. struck thyself, now I will strike thee," is the relentless sentence of the diWhile the two thus whispered to each vine decree, recognizing the incompe tence of man's self-immolation to exact the last farthing of the sacrifice. And God, who has hitherto spoilt him as a child with consolations, will now let him wither and starve. Is it not, Suso questions with undeviating faith, by ancient right that love and suffering go together? Love's martyrs in God's calendar, no less than in the annals of mankind, "must be ever, ever dying." It is impossible to ignore the fact, from whatsoever point of view we regard the mystic's visions-whether as the morbid phantasms of hysteria, or as the miraculous manifestations of divine grace, or as the rising to the surface of that inner life of whose existence the senses are normally unconscious-that to the elder mystic they were bought with a price, with the abnegation of all earth's treasures and the purchase money of the body's utmost anguish. Born before the day of cheap merchandise, his traffic was in truth and literally a dear bargain and of hunger and thirst, of tears blood. If the prize he sought was an illusion, the cost was, at least, the very reality of all that makes life, to most of us, endurable. Thus Suso bought those radiant hours he chronicles with such candid spontaneity that his faith-or his credulity-infects our imagination, if not our reason. For a moment we seem to look through an open door into that far-off land cf the mystic, where, in the matter of religion, there is neither Jew nor Gentile, bond nor free, east nor west, Greek nor Barbarian. From the grated window of the Dominican's cell we catch a glimpse of the flowers of another country, the sunsets of another sky, or, if we perhaps fail to see the vision, we still see the eyes that saw it, those cloistered eyes to whose boundless outlook the narrow walls of his spiritual prison could set no horizon. One by one the visions rise. In the solitary chapel, where he keeps painful vigil until the watchman's horn announces the daybreak, as the morning star ascends, voices sound with exceeding sweetness singing "Arise and be illuminated, O Jerusalem." Bright princes of heaven bid him look into himself and see how God plays his play of love with his soul, heavenly musicians lead dances "swelling up and falling back into the wild abyss of God's hiddenness." Then comes stages where visions and contemplations fuse, nor is it easy to detect if the narrative deals with what Suso regarded as an outward image, present to his sight, or an inward image, present only to his understanding. Making of material life but an allegory of the immaterial, or-in the sceptic's prose-making the reality into a dream that the dream may become a reality, he transmutes the customs of earth into the rites. of the soul: Thus he kept carnival, and thus on New Year's night, when young men in their folly go out to make their sweethearts give them garlands, he, too, would go to his eternal love and beg of Him a wreath. So, too, on May Day eve he would set up a spiritual May-tree, saying, "Hail, heavenly may bough of the eternal wisdom! I offer thee to-day, in place of red roses, a heart-felt love; for every little violet, a lowly inclination; for all lilies, a pure embrace; for all flowers of heath or down, forest or plain, tree or meadow, a spiritual kiss; for all songs of little birds on any May Day flight, praises without end." Was it any marvel that in such blendings of earth and heaven the boy monk whose childhood had ever greeted the sweet maid, God's mother, with spring's first rose, should see on his two hands and covering his feet, in the weariness of later years, the red roses and green leaves of celestial betokenings? Indeed, to such a nature as Suso's, a nature which, as somewhat wistfully he confesses, "could not remain without a love," with unsullied human affections, and a sensitive temperament charged with that keen emotional joy in beauty which to-day makes of a man a poet or a painter, the doctrine of that inner mystical life must have dawned as a gospel of divinest revelation. For there sight might survey loveliness, ears might revel in melodies of unsubstan- His eyes fail him for grief; taking her tial sweetness, unblamed; there, too how pathetically significant is the frequent recurrence of this vision in the ascetic chronicle!-childless manhood and barren womanhood might hold the childhood of the whole world, epitomized as Mary's Baby, in the arms of the soul. It was to Suso a doctrine sanctifying his humanity, illuminating the barred and sterile twilight of his empty cell, extending the precarious possibilities of time into the secure infinitudes of eternity. not Nor are his writings tainted with the cold egoism of a meaner sanctity. "God so willing," are the words of Angela of Foligno, the earlier Tuscan mystic, whose "Visions and Instructions," taken down by Brother Arnold, her Franciscan confessor, are without passages of imaginative beauty, "it happened at that time that my mother died, who was a great obstacle to me in the way of God. And in like manner my husband and all my sons. . . . I received great consolation in their deaths." Nor when, in divine vision, the Virgin brings her sleeping child, and he lies with closed eyes in Angela's embrace, does her rhapsody of adoring tenderness efface our remembrance of that cold reference to those dead children of her earthly home who in other days had lain in the arms and been cherished upon the breast where now the eternal baby rests. Such estrangementto use no harsher epithet-from natural human love is wholly absent from Suso's character. The chapter which tells of his sister's fall from the obedience of her convent vows, of her sin and sorrow and forlorn abandonment, betrays in every sentence how firmly the fibres of his heart clung to their old attachments. "When he heard he became like a stone for sorrow, his heart died. . . he went about like one out of his mind. Then the thought came to him, 'Cast aside all human shame and spring into the deep gulf to her and lift her up.'" So he seeks and finds the poor refugee of sin, sick and lonely, sitting on a cottage bench. my child in his arms he cries, "Alas, my child! alas, my sister, alas, gentle maiden! St. Agnes, how bitter has thy feast day become!" She, falling at his feet with great tears, pleads-in some sort we divine Suso's own teaching in the plea-for pardon. "Reverence," she prays, "God in me." "Alas, my child!" is Suso's cry, "thou, from hood up my heart and soul's joy, come hither to me;" and, in a later episode. "still," he says of a deeply corrupted and impenitent sinner, whose slanderous accusation has heaped dishonor upon his own fair fame, "I honor in her the dignity of all pure women." The scene of quaint pathos, where the baby child of his false accuser is brought to his cell, may well stand foremost amongst the most incongruous situations of the great human comedy of real life, where love and tenderness recklessly set at nought the wisdom and prudence and justice of the world. Towards the close of the "Life," when, one is inclined to guess, the greater part of Suso's sixty-five years of mortality have passed over his head, stilling his impulses and silencing the last whispers of unsatisfied cravings, "the exterior manifestations" gave place, he says, to those which were interior. Then it is that, with a touch of dispassionate indifference, he attempts to analyze the gift of the vision-seer in words with which Sta. Teresa and Fray Juan de la Cruz were possibly familiar, for Suso's writings, as well as those of Tauler and Eckart, were freely circulated in Spanish translations in the century following his death. We are not concerned with the truth or rationality of the creed of transcendental theology, professed by each saint alike; it is truly a region upon whose threshold the foot of the heretic may well falter. But whether it be of those profoundest ecstasies of the wholly emancipated soul, or of those simpler visions that, according to their doctrine, lie lower and nearer to humanity (visions of the "sensual soul"). most of us, though with no arrogant "it is nothing more than a mystical nineteenth-century self-complacency, exposition of the creeds taught to will concur assentingly in the sentence with which Suso concludes his exposition-the same phrase occurs in Sta. Teresa's writings-"only they who have experienced can understand." These autobiographical fragments of Suso's life present us with a picture of the mystic ascetic in his more active personal, spiritual, and divine relationships. The revelations of Juliana of Norwich serve as a complementary type, perhaps the most striking extant, of the modes of thought of the passive ecstatic. "XVI Revelations of Divine Love, showed to a devote servant of our Lord, called Mother Juliana, an anchorete of Norwich; who lived in the Dayes of K. Edward the Third"-which Revelations were revived from an ancient copy and published in 1670 by Hugh Paulin Cressy-is the account of the book supplied by the preface and title-page; and various later editions, Catholic and Protestant, of this eloquent Old England volume, of days when Chaucer was making his "Canterbury Tales," and Sir John Mandeville had lately finished his "Travells," testify to the permanent interest it excited in a certain section of the religious public. It is a book of far less picturesquely colored imagination than the book of the Revelations of St. Mechtild with its vestures of white and rose color, its golden bells and diadems of precious stones, its raiment like Heaven's blue besprinkled with blossoms of gold, and its fair five-petalled rose that covers the Heart of God. It has not the practical note of St. Bridget's inspired instructions, which, at least in the selections made by her English editor, betray the accent of the reformer and teacher whose eyes, like those of Sta. Teresa, behold the daily life of earth no less clearly than the spiritual images of eternity; nor will it ever be asserted of Juliana's work, either in praise or depreciation, as the recent translator of St. Catherine asserts of her famous "Ecstatic Dialogue," that every child in the Catholic poor schools." For, humble daughter of her Church as Juliana was, her mysticism belongs to a region where truly dogmatic catechisms have no entrance. It is a mysticism at once profoundly personal as it deals with the inner relationship of Juliana to God, and fervently apostolic as it regards the relationship of God to Juliana's "even Christen"-her equals in the commonwealth of Christ. Life, indeed, to her possesses no other aspects. The distractions of Teresa's great apostolate, the intellectual vistas of San Juan's theological scholarship, even the interruptions of Suso's community life and missionary labors, are unknown to the solitary anchorite. No faintest shadow, no passing echo of battles and sieges, of Spanish wars and poisoned princes, penetrated the cell where Juliana, "a simple creature, unlettered, living in deathly flesh, on the 13th night of May in the year of our Lord 1373, tooke all her rites of holie church and went not to have liven till daie." Condensed into some few sentencestheir brevity accentuates the force of the narrative-we follow the record of those night hours of six hundred Mays ago, hours which were to serve as a mere preface to the fifteen ensuing years of mortal sickness, the period of her visions. It is a prelude recalling to our memory the words of St. John of the Cross, "The soul unable to bear the ecstasies in a body so frail cries aloud to God, "Turn away thine eyes from me. Turn them away, O my beloved!" and the fable of the "Morte d'Arthur" is here verified, "When the deathly flesh beheld the spiritual thing it began to tremble right hard." As we read we become witnesses of the scene. We see the slow dying, the speechless lips, the eyes on which darkness settles like a weight; the limbs are numb, the breath fails, and the woman's soul burns itself free. The picture is complete in all its details. The priest is there and he sets the cross before her. "I have brought thee," he tells her, "the Image of our Saviour, looke thereupon and comfort thee." But she already thought she was well, "for mine eien were sett upright into heaven. Yet, for obedience sake, she looks. Then the earthly framework fades, one passing mention of the red signet ring upon her hand, to which "for roundhead" the blood-drops that in ghostly sight fall from Christ's lacerated brows are likened; one simile drawn from the water that dips from "the evesing of an house after a great shower," in which we seem for a moment to catch the sound of May rain on the roof, and all the events of transitory life are obliterated. The sharpness of that long dying still encompasses her, the natural life of the body, of the senses, of the intellect, has surrendered its last citadel, but in that eclipse of mortality the soul, disenthralled from the restrictive conditions of time and space, drawing in its royal train the subjugated faculties, beholds the invisible, hears the inaudible, and apprehends the unknown. And yet with Juliana, as with Suso, it is not so much the manumission of the spirit from the flesh, of which we are made aware, as it is of the flesh with spirituality. The images presented are no vacant metaphors. Sight has remained sigat, only the soul has opened a new avenue into the eternities on either side; hear ing has remained hearing, but by that spiritual contagion its capacities are extended into the infinite. Above all, the heart of the woman has remained a heart, now "glad and merry in love" for that Lord of hers "who will be trusted for he is full homely and courteous," now broken with compassion at the spectacle of his despiteous passion. "I saw the sweet face as it were dry and bloodless with pale dying and dead languring," thus she describes the opening of one of those earlier visions; she saw "the bloodshed and the pain and the blowing of the wind and cold," and how, she questions, "might any pain be more than to see Him that is all my life, all my bliss. and all my joy, suffer?" The love of a human womanhood rings through every sentence of the sequel. 999 "Look up to heaven,' a proffer, as it Lad been friendly, said to me, 'Look up to heaven to His Father.' I answered inwardly with all the might of my soul, 'Nay, I will not. Thou art my heaven.' "I had liefer have been in that paine till doomsday," she adds, "than have come to heaven otherwise than by Him," and human, well we recognize it, is the vehemence of that reiterated exclusion of all other paths to joy. "Me liked," she says, "none other heaven." Once again she touches the same octave, condensing in a single phrase which has seldom been transcended in its brief expression of the possession that leaves the infinity of love's desire still unsatiated: "I saw Him and I sought Him. I had Him, and I wanted Him!" Fletcher's tenderness, Ford's passion, lose color placed side by side with the utterances of this worn recluse whose hands are empty of every treasure. And round all her "even Christen," God's lovers in heaven and on earth, not omitting those dear sinners whose sins by God's great courtesie-it is the word she uses almost oftener than any other in connection with the Deityare forgotten, her warm affections cling. For St. John of Beverley, who it seems was a "kind neighbor and of her knowing;" for our Lady St. Mary, a simple maiden, but little waxen above a child, as she stood to Juliana's beholding; for God himself, the Lord who "took no place in his own house," who "is a very noble Lord and will save his word in all things" (the language of chivalry echoes fantastically from the outward world of the Black Prince's day), "and will make "all well that is not well," for these her love clothes itself as with the tender impetus of a child's career. God, it is true, has his secrets; sin and hell trouble her betimes, as they have troubled many another before and since; but a certain gay optimism of faith and hope triumphant, surmounts that infirmity of fear. "Sin is |