with frequent fasts and severe ascetic discipline,
depressed her physical forces, and her nervous system was thrown
into a state of the highest exaltation. Thoughts became things, and
ideas were projected from her vivid fancy upon the empty air around
her. It was therefore no wonder that, after spending long hours in
vigils and meditating always on the thought of Christ, she should
have seemed to take the sacrament from His hands, to pace the chapel
in communion with Him, to meet Him in the form of priest and beggar,
to hear Him speaking to her as a friend. Once when the anguish of
sin had plagued her with disturbing dreams, Christ came and gave her
His own heart in exchange for hers. When lost in admiration before
the cross at Pisa, she saw His five wounds stream with blood--five
crimson rays smote her, passed into her soul, and left their marks
upon her hands and feet and side. The light of Christ's glory shone
round about her, she partook of His martyrdom, and awaking from her
trance she cried to Raymond, 'Behold! I bear in my body the marks of
the Lord Jesus!'

This miracle had happened to S. Francis. It was regarded as the sign
of fellowship with Christ, of worthiness to drink His cup, and to be
baptised with His baptism. We find the same idea at least in the old
Latin hymns:

Fac me plagis vulnerari--
Cruce hac inebriari--
Fac ut portem Christi mortem,
Passionis fac consortem,
Et plagas recolere.

These are words from the 'Stabat Mater;' nor did S. Francis and S.
Catherine do more than carry into the vividness of actual
hallucination what had been the poetic rapture of many less
ecstatic, but not less ardent, souls. They desired to be _literally_
'crucified with Christ;' they were not satisfied with metaphor or
sentiment, and it seemed to them that their Lord had really
vouchsafed to them the yearning of their heart. We need not here
raise the question whether the stigmata had ever been actually
self-inflicted by delirious saint or hermit: it was not pretended
that the wounds of S. Catherine were visible during her lifetime.
After her death the faithful thought that they had seen them on her
corpse, and they actually appeared in the relics of her hands and
feet. The pious fraud, if fraud there must have been, should be
ascribed, not to the saint herself, but to devotees and
relic-mongers.[1] The order of S. Dominic would not be behind that
of S. Francis. If the latter boasted of their stigmata, t