iritual impressions; immediately around him,
impressions of the same kind followed by the contagion of example,
mutual fervor, common expectation, involuntary emulation, and that
overstrained eagerness which creates its object; with all the more
certainty that the individual himself works on himself, in silence, five
hours a day, according to the prescriptions of a profound psychology, in
order that his bare conception may take upon itself body and substance.
What-ever may be the subject of his meditations, he repeats it twice the
same day, and each time he begins by "creating the scene," the Nativity
or the Passion, the Day of Judgment or Hell; he converts the remote and
undefined story, the dry, abstract dogma, into a detailed and figured
representation; he dwells on it, he evokes in turn the images furnished
by the five senses, visual, audible, tactile, olfactory, and even
gustatory; he groups them together, and in the evening he animates them
afresh in order that he may find them more intense when he awakes the
next morning. He thus obtains the complete, precise, almost physical
spectacle of his aspirations; he reaches the alibi, that mental
transposition, that reversal of the points of view in which the order
of certainties becomes inverted, in which substantial objects seem to
be vain phantoms and the mystic world a world of substantial
reality.[5279]--According to persons and circumstances, the theme for
meditation differs, and the retreat is prolonged for a shorter or longer
period. For laymen, it generally lasts for three days only; for the
Brethren of the Christian Schools it is eight days annually, and when,
at the age of twenty-eight, they take their vows in perpetuity, it lasts
thirty days: for the secular priests, it lasts a little less than a
week, while the theme on which their meditations are concentrated is the
supernatural character of the priest. The priest who is confessor and
ministrant of the Eucharist, the priest who is the savior and restorer,
the priest who is pastor, preacher and administrator--such are the
subjects on which their imagination, assisted and directed, must work
in order to compose the cordial which has to support them for the entire
year. None is more potent; that which the Puritans drank at an American
camp-meeting or at a Scotch revival was stronger but of less enduring
effect.[5280]

Two different cordials, one reinforcing the other, are mixed together in
this drink, both bei