hich, in any
professor of religion, Christian practice is not the most decisive
evidence.... The degree in which our experience is productive of
practice shows the degree in which our experience is spiritual and
divine."

Catholic writers are equally emphatic. The good dispositions which a
vision, or voice, or other apparent heavenly favor leave behind them
are the only marks by which we {22} may be sure they are not possible
deceptions of the tempter. Says Saint Teresa:--

"Like imperfect sleep which, instead of giving more strength to the
head, doth but leave it the more exhausted, the result of mere
operations of the imagination is but to weaken the soul. Instead of
nourishment and energy she reaps only lassitude and disgust: whereas a
genuine heavenly vision yields to her a harvest of ineffable spiritual
riches, and an admirable renewal of bodily strength. I alleged these
reasons to those who so often accused my visions of being the work of
the enemy of mankind and the sport of my imagination.... I showed them
the jewels which the divine hand had left with me:--they were my actual
dispositions. All those who knew me saw that I was changed; my
confessor bore witness to the fact; this improvement, palpable in all
respects, far from being hidden, was brilliantly evident to all men.
As for myself, it was impossible to believe that if the demon were its
author, he could have used, in order to lose me and lead me to hell, an
expedient so contrary to his own interests as that of uprooting my
vices, and filling me with masculine courage and other virtues instead,
for I saw clearly that a single one of these visions was enough to
enrich me with all that wealth."[6]

[6] Autobiography, ch. xxviii.

I fear I may have made a longer excursus than was necessary, and that
fewer words would have dispelled the uneasiness which may have arisen
among some of you as I announced my pathological programme. At any
rate you must all be ready now to judge the religious life by its
results exclusively, and I shall assume that the bugaboo of morbid
origin will scandalize your piety no more.

Still, you may ask me, if its results are to be the ground of our final
spiritual estimate of a religious phenomenon, why threaten us at all
with so much existential study of its conditions? Why not simply leave
pathological questions out?

To this I reply in two ways. First, I say, irrepressible curiosity
imperiously leads one on;