stretched out
his feet they lay bare on the floor and froze, if he gathered them up
the blood became all on fire in his legs, and this was great pain. His
feet were full of sores, his legs dropsical, his knees bloody and
seared, his loins covered with scars from the horsehair, his body
wasted, his mouth parched with intense thirst, and his hands tremulous
from weakness. Amid these torments he spent his nights and days; and
he endured them all out of the greatness of the love which he bore in
his heart to the Divine and Eternal Wisdom, our Lord Jesus Christ,
whose agonizing sufferings he sought to imitate. After a time he gave
up this penitential exercise of the door, and instead of it he took up
his abode in a very small cell, and used the bench, which was so narrow
and short that he could not stretch himself upon it, as his bed. In
this hole, or upon the door, he lay at night in his usual bonds, for
about eight years. It was also his custom, during the space of
twenty-five years, provided he was staying in the convent, never to go
after compline in winter into any warm room, or to the convent stove to
warm himself, no matter how cold it might be, unless he was obliged to
do so for other reasons. Throughout all these years he never took a
bath, either a water or a sweating bath; and this he did in order to
mortify his comfort-seeking body. He practiced during a long time such
rigid poverty that he would neither receive nor touch a penny, either
with leave or without it. For a considerable time he strove to attain
such a high degree of purity that he would neither scratch nor touch
any part of his body, save only his hands and feet."[184]

[184] The Life of the Blessed Henry Suso, by Himself, translated by T.
F. Knox, London, 1865, pp. 56-80, abridged.

I spare you the recital of poor Suso's self-inflicted tortures from
thirst. It is pleasant to know that after his fortieth year, God
showed him by a series of visions that he had sufficiently broken down
the natural man, and that he might leave these exercises off. His case
is distinctly pathological, but he does not seem to have had the
alleviation, which some ascetics have enjoyed, of an alteration of
sensibility capable of actually turning torment into a perverse kind of
pleasure. Of the founder of the Sacred Heart order, for example, we
read that

"Her love of pain and suffering was insatiable.... She said that she
could cheerfully live till the da