a humble sufferer, persecuted as a Huguenot under Louis XIV:--

"They shut all the doors," Blanche Gamond writes, "and I saw six women,
each with a bunch of willow rods as thick as the hand could hold, and a
yard long. He gave me the order, 'Undress yourself,' which I did. He
said, 'You are leaving on your shift; you must take it off.' They had
so little patience that they took it off themselves, and I was naked
from the waist up. They brought a cord with which they tied me to a
beam in the kitchen. They drew the cord tight with all their strength
and asked me, 'Does it hurt you?' and then they discharged their fury
upon me, exclaiming as they struck me, 'Pray now to your God.' It was
the Roulette woman who held this language. But at this moment I
received the greatest consolation that I can ever receive in my life,
since I had the honor of being whipped for the name of Christ, and in
addition of being crowned with his mercy and his consolations. Why can
I not write down the inconceivable influences, consolations, and peace
which I felt interiorly? To understand them one must have passed by
the same trial; they were so great that I was ravished, for there where
afflictions abound grace is given superabundantly. In vain the women
cried, 'We must double our blows; she does not feel them, for she
neither speaks nor cries.' And how should I have cried, since I was
swooning with happiness within?"[173]

[173] Claparede et Goty: Deux Heroines de la Foi, Paris, 1880, p. 112.

The transition from tenseness, self-responsibility, and worry, to
equanimity, receptivity, and peace, is the most wonderful of all those
shiftings of inner equilibrium, those changes of the personal centre of
energy, which I have analyzed so often; and the chief wonder of it is
that it so often comes about, not by doing, but by simply relaxing and
throwing the burden down. This abandonment of self-responsibility
seems to be the fundamental act in specifically religious, as
distinguished from moral practice. It antedates theologies and is
independent of philosophies. Mind-cure, theosophy, stoicism, ordinary
neurological hygiene, insist on it as emphatically as Christianity
does, and it is capable of entering into closest marriage with every
speculative creed.[174] Christians who have it strongly live in what
is called "recollection," and are never anxious about the future, nor
worry over the outcome of the day. Of Saint Catharine of Ge