nun.' Well, and what more tragical object, to those who will look patiently and lovingly at human nature, than a hysterical nun? She may have been driven into a convent by some disappointment in love. And has not disappointed affection been confessed, in all climes and ages, to enshroud its victim ever after, as it were, in a sanctuary of reverent pity? If sorrow 'broke her brains, as well as broke her heart, shall we do aught but love her the more for her capacity of love? Or she may have entered the convent, as thousands did, in girlish simplicity, to escape from a world which she had not tried, before she had discovered that the world could give her something which the convent could not. What more tragical than her discovery in herself of a capacity for love which could never be satisfied within that prison-and worse, when that capacity began to vindicate itself in strange forms of disease, seemingly to her supernatural, often agonizing, often degrading, and at the same time (strange contradiction) mixed itself up with her noblest thoughts, to ennoble them still more, and inspire her with a love for all that is fair and lofty, for self-devotion and self-sacrifice, such as she had never felt before? Shall we blame hershall we even smile at her, if, after the dreadful question 'Is this the possession of a demon ?' had alternated with Is this the inspiration of a god?' she settled down, as the only escape from madness and suicide, into the latter thought, and believed that she found in the ideal and perfect manhood of One whom she was told to revere and love as a God, and who had sacrificed his own life for her, a substitute for that merely human affection from which she was for ever debarred? Why blame her for not remembering that which was wanting, or making straight that which was crooked? Let God judge her, not we; and the fit critics of her conduct are not the easy gentlemanlike scholars, like Mr. Vaughan's Athertons and Gowers, discussing the aberrations of fanaticism' over wine and walnuts; or the gay girl, Kate; hardly even the happy mother, Mrs. Atherton: but those whose

hairs are grey with sorrow; who have been softened at once and hardened in the fire of God; who have cried out of the bottomless deep like David, while lover and friend were hid away from them, and they lay amid the corpses of their dead hopes, dead health, dead joy, as on a ghastly battle-field, 'stript among the dead, like those who are wounded, and cut away from God's hands; who have struggled drowning in the horrible mire of doubt, and have felt all God's billows and waves sweep over them, till they were weary of crying, and their sight failed for waiting so long upon God; and all the faith and prayer which was left was, Thou wilt not leave my soul in hell, nor suffer thy Holy One to see corruption.' Be it understood however, for fear of any mistake, that we hold Mr. Vaughan to be simply and altogether right in his main idea. His one test for all these people, and all which they said or did, is-Were they made practically better men and women thereby? He sees clearly that the spiritual' is none other than the 'moral'-that which has to do with right and wrong; and he has a righteous contempt for everything and anything, however graceful and reverent, and artistic and devout, and celestial and super-celestial, except in as far as he finds it making men and women do better work in everyday life. Therefore he is altogether right at heart; and any criticisms of ours on his book are but amantium ira.

And therefore we will protest against such a sketch as this, even of one of the least honourable of the middle-age saints :

ATHERTON. Angela de Foligni, who made herself miserable-I must say

something the converse of flourishedabout the beginning of the fourteenth century, was a fine model pupil of this sort, a genuine daughter of St. Francis. Her mother, her husband, her children dead, she is alone and sorrowful. She betakes herself to violent devotionfalls ill-suffers incessant anguish from a complication of disorders--has rap turous consolations and terrific tempta tions-is dashed in a moment from a seat of glory above the empyrean

Very amusing, is it not? To

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have one's mother, husband, children die-the most commonplace sort of thing-what (over one's wine and walnuts) one describes as being 'alone and sorrowful.' Men who having tasted the blessings conveyed in those few words, have also found the horror conveyed in them, have no epithets for the state of mind in which such a fate would leave them. They simply pray that if that hour came, they might just have faith enough left not to curse God and die. Amusing, too, her falling ill, and suffering under a complication of disorders, especially if those disorders were the fruit of combined grief and widowhood. Amusing also her betaking herself to violent devotion. In the first place, if devotion be a good thing, could she have too much of it? If it be the way to make people good (as is commonly held by all Christian. sects), could she become too good? The more important question which springs out of the fact, we will ask presently. She has rapturous consolations and terrific temptations.' Do you mean that the consolations came first, and that the temptations were a revulsion from spiritual' exaltation into 'spiritual' collapse and melancholy, or that the temptations came first, and the consolations came after to save her from madness and despair? Either may be the case; perhaps both were: but somewhat more of care should have been taken in expressing so important a spiritual sequence as either case exhibits.

It is twelve years and more since we studied the history of the B. Angela de Foligni,' and many another kindred saint; and we cannot recollect what were the terrific temptations, what was the floor of hell which the poor thing saw yawning beneath her feet. But we must ask Mr. Vaughan, has he ever read Bocaccio, or any of the Italian novelists up to the seventeenth century? And if so, can he not understand how Angela de Foligni, the lovely Italian widow of the fourteenth century, had her terrific temptations, to which if she had yielded she might have fallen to the lowest pit of hell, let that word mean what it may; and temptations all the more terrific because she saw

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every widow round her considering them no temptations at all, but yielding to them, going out to invite them in the most business-like, nay, duty-like, way? What if she had 'rapturous consolations?' What if she did pour out to One who was worthy not of less but of more affection than she offered in her passionate southern heart, in language which in our colder northerns would be mere hypocrisy, yet which she had been taught to believe lawful by that interpretation of the Canticles which (be it always remembered) is common to Evangelicals and to Romanists? What if even, in reward for her righteous belief, that what she saw all widows round her doing, was abominable and to be avoided at all risks, she were permitted to enjoy a passionate affection, which after all was not misplaced? There are mysteries in religion, as in all things, where it is better not to intrude behind the veil. Wisdom is justified of all her children, and folly may be justified of some of her children also. Let Mr. Vaughan consider Bocaccio, and reconsider his harshness to poor Angela; let him reconsider, too, his harshness to poor St. Brigitta,—in our eyes a beautiful and noble figure. A widow she, too-and what worlds of sorrow are there in that word, especially when applied to the pure deep-hearted Northern woman, as she was, she leaves her Scandinavian pine-forests to worship and to give wherever she can, till she arrives at Rome, the centre of the universe, the seat of Christ's vicegerent, the city of God, the gate of Paradise. Thousands of weary miles she travels, through danger and sorrow-and when she finds it, behold, it is a lie and a sham; not the gate of Paradise, but the gate of Sodom and of hell. Was not that enough to madden her, if mad she became? What matter after that her angel dictated discourses on the Blessed Virgin,' 'bombastic invocations to the Saviour's eyes, ears, hair?'-they were at least the best objects of worship which the age gave her. In one thing she was right, and kept her first love.

What was not quite so bad, she gives to the world a series of revelations, in which the vices of popes

and prelates are lashed unsparingly, and threatened with speedy judgment.' Not quite so bad. To us the whole phenomenon wears an utterly different aspect. At the risk of her life, at the risk of being burned alive-did any one

ever

consider what that means ?-the noble Norsewoman, like an Alruna maid of old, hurls out her divine hereditary hatred of sin and filth and lies. At last she falls back on Christ himself as the only home for a homeless soul in such an evil time. And she is not burnt alive. The hand of One mightier than she is over her, and she is safe under the shadow of His wings, till her weary work is done and she goes home, her righteousness accepted for His sake her folly, hysterics, dreams -call them by what base name we will-forgiven and forgotten for the sake of her many sorrows, and her faithfulness to the end.

Mr. Vaughan must reconsider these sketches; but he need not reconsider his admirable reflections on them, every word of which is true:

What a condemning comment on the pretended tender mercies of the Church are those narratives which Rome delights to parade of the sufferings, mental and bodily, which her devotees were instructed to inflict upon themselves! I am reminded of the thirsting mule, which has, in some countries, to strike with its hoof among the spines of the cactus, and drink, with lamed foot and bleeding lips, the few drops of milk which ooze from the broken thorns. Affectionate suffering natures came to Rome for comfort; but her scanty kindness is only to be drawn with anguish from the cruel sharpness of asceticism. The worldly, the audacious, escape easily; but these pliant, excitable temperaments, so anxiously in earnest, may be made useful. The more dangerous, frightful, or unnatural their performances, the more profit for their keepers. Men and women are trained by torturing processes to deny their nature, and then they are exhibited to bring grist to the mill-like birds and beasts forced to postures and services against the laws of their being-like those who must perform perilous feats on ropes or with lions, nightly hazarding their lives to fill the pockets of a manager. The selfdevotion of which Rome boasts so much is a self-devotion she has always thus made the most of for herself. Calculat

ing men, who have thought only of the interest of the priesthood, have known

well how best to stimulate and to display the spasmodic movements of a brainsick disinterestedness. I have not the shadow of a doubt that, once and

again, some priest might have been seen, with cold grey eye, endeavouring to do a stroke of diplomacy by means of the enthusiastic Catharine, making the fancied ambassadress of heaven in reality the tool of a schemer. Such unquestionable virtues as these visionaries may some of them have possessed, cannot be fairly set down to the credit of the Church, which has used them all for mercenary or ambitious purposes, and infected them everywhere with a morbid character. Some of these mystics, floating down the great ecclesiastical current of the Middle Age, appear to me like the trees carried away by the inundation of some mighty tropical river. They drift along the stream, passive, lifeless, broken; yet they are covered with gay verdure, the aquatic plants hang and twine about the sodden timber and the draggled leaves, the trunk is a sailing garden of flowers. But the adornment is not that of nature-it is the decoration of another and a strange element; the roots are in the air; the boughs, which should be full of birds, are in the flood, covered by its alien products, swimming side by side with the alligator. So has this priestcraft swept its victims from their natural place and independent growth, to clothe them, in their helplessness, with a false spiritual adornment, neither scriptural nor human, but ecclesiastical- the native product of that overwhelming super stition which has subverted and enslaved their nature. The Church of Rome takes care that while simple souls think they are cultivating Christian graces, they shall be forging their own chains; that their attempts to honour God shall always dishonour, because they disenfranchise themselves. To be humble, to be obedient, to be charitable, under such direction, is to be contentedly ignorant, pitiably abject, and notoriously

swindled.

Mr. Vaughan cannot be too severe upon the Romish priesthood. But it is one thing to dismiss with summary contempt men who, as they do, keep the keys of knowledge, and neither enter in themselves nor

suffer others to enter, and quite another thing to apply the same summary jurisdiction to men who, under whatsoever confusions, are

feeling earnestly and honestly after truth. And therefore we re

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gret exceedingly the mock trial which he has introduced into his Introduction. We regret it for his own sake; for it will drive away from the book-indeed, it has driven-thoughtful and reverent people who, having a strong though vague inclination toward the mystics, might be very profitably taught by the after pages to separate the evil from the good in the Bernards and Guyons whom they admire, they scarce know why; and will shock, too, scholars to whom Hindoo and Persian thoughts on these subjects are matters not of ridicule, but of solemn and earnest investigation. We do hope to see these pages vanish from a future edition, or if they be retained, put at the end and not at the beginning of the book. As it is, they are a needless stumbling-block upon the threshold.

Besides, the question is not so easily settled. Putting aside the flippancy of the passage, it involves something very like a petitio principii to ask offhand Does the man mean a living union of heart to Christ, a spiritual fellowship or converse with the Father, when he talks of the union of the believer with God-participation in the Divine nature?' For first, what we want to know is, the meaning of the words-what means 'living ?' what 'union?' what 'heart?' They are terms common to the mystic and to the popular religionist, only differently interpreted; and in the meanings attributed to them lies nothing less than the whole world-old dispute between Nominalist and Realist; not yet to be settled in two lines by two gentlemen over their wine, much less ignored as a thing settled beyond all dispute already. If by 'living union of heart with '-Mr. Vaughan means identity of morals with 'let him say so: but let him bear in mind that all the great Evangelicals have meant much more than this by those words; that on the whole, instead of considering as he seems to do, and we do-the moral and the spiritual as identical, they have put them in antithesis to each other, and looked down upon mere morality' just because it did not seem to them to involve that supernatural,

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transcendental, mystic' element which they considered that they found in Scripture. From Luther to Owen and Baxter, from them to Wesley, Cecil, and Venn, Newton, Bridges, the great Evangelical authorities would (not very clearly or consistently, for they were but poor metaphysicians, but honestly and earnestly) accept some modified form of the mystic's theory, even to the discerning in particular thoughts, frames, impulses, and inward witnessings, immediate communications from heaven.' Surely Mr. Vaughan must be aware that the majority of 'vital Christians' on this ground are among his mystic offenders; and that those who deny such possibilities are but too liable to be stigmatized as Pelagians' and Rationalists.' His friend Atherton is bound to show cause why those names are not to be applied to him, as he is bound to show what he means by 'living union with Christ,' and why he complains of the mystic for desiring participation in the Divine nature. If he does so, he only desires what the New Testament formally, and word for word, promises him: whatsoever be the meaning of the term, he is not to be blamed for using it. Mr. Vaughan cannot have forgotten the many expressions, both of St. Paul and St. John, which do at first sight go far to justify the mystic, though they are but seldom heard, and more seldom boldly commented on, in modern pulpits,-of Christ being formed in men, dwelling in men; of God dwelling in man and man in God; of Christ being the life of men, of men living, and moving, and having their being in God; and many another passage. If these be mere metaphors, let the fact be stated, with due reasons for it. But there is no sin or shame in interpreting them in that literal and realist sense in which they seem at first sight to have been written. The first duty of a scholar who sets before himself to investigate the phenomena of 'mysticism,' so called, should be to answer these questions: Can there be a direct communication, above and beyond sense or consciousness, between the human spirit and God the Spirit? And if so, what are its conditions, where