he former
would be ready to perforate the hand or foot of their dead saint.
Thus the ecstasies of genius or devotion are brought to earth, and
rendered vulgar by mistaken piety and the rivalry of sects. The
people put the most material construction on all tropes and
metaphors: above the door of S. Catherine's chapel at Siena, for
example, it is written--

Haec tenet ara caput Catharinae; corda requiris?
Haec imo Christus pectore clausa tenet.

The frequent conversations which she held with S. Dominic and other
patrons of the Church, and her supernatural marriage, must be
referred to the same category. Strong faith, and constant
familiarity with one order of ideas, joined with a creative power of
fancy, and fostered by physical debility, produced these miraculous
colloquies. Early in her career, her injured constitution, resenting
the violence with which it had been forced to serve the ardours of
her piety, troubled her with foul phantoms, haunting images of sin
and seductive whisperings, which clearly revealed a morbid condition
of the nervous system. She was on the verge of insanity. The reality
of her inspiration and her genius are proved by the force with which
her human sympathies, and moral dignity, and intellectual vigour
triumphed over these diseased hallucinations of the cloister, and
converted them into the instruments for effecting patriotic and
philanthropic designs. There was nothing savouring of mean
pretension or imposture in her claim to supernatural enlightenment.
Whatever we may think of the wisdom of her public policy with regard
to the Crusades and to the Papal Sovereignty, it is impossible to
deny that a holy and high object possessed her from the earliest to
the latest of her life--that she lived for ideas greater than
self-aggrandisement or the saving of her soul, for the greatest,
perhaps, which her age presented to an earnest Catholic.

[1] It is not impossible that the stigmata may have been
naturally produced in the person of S. Francis or S.
Catherine. There are cases on record in which grave
nervous disturbances have resulted in such modifications
of the flesh as may have left the traces of wounds in
scars and blisters.

The abuses to which the indulgence of temperaments like that of S.
Catherine must in many cases have given rise, are obvious.
Hysterical women and half-witted men, without possessing her
abilities and understanding her objects, beheld unme