aning visions,
and dreamed childish dreams. Others won the reputation of sanctity
by obstinate neglect of all the duties of life and of all the
decencies of personal cleanliness. Every little town in Italy could
show its saints like the Santa Fina of whom San Gemignano boasts--a
girl who lay for seven years on a back-board till her mortified
flesh clung to the wood; or the San Bartolo, who, for hideous
leprosy, received the title of the Job of Tuscany. Children were
encouraged in blasphemous pretensions to the special power of
Heaven, and the nerves of weak women were shaken by revelations in
which they only half believed. We have ample evidence to prove how
the trade of miracles is still carried on, and how in the France of
our days, when intellectual vigour has been separated from old forms
of faith, such vision-mongering undermines morality, encourages
ignorance, and saps the force of individuals. But S. Catherine must
not be confounded with those sickly shams and make-believes. Her
enthusiasms were real; they were proper to her age; they inspired
her with unrivalled self-devotion and unwearied energy; they
connected her with the political and social movements of her
country.

Many of the supernatural events in S. Catherine's life were founded
on a too literal acceptation of biblical metaphors. The Canticles,
perhaps, inspired her with the belief in a mystical marriage. An
enigmatical sentence of S. Paul's suggested the stigmata. When the
saint bestowed her garment upon Christ in the form of a beggar and
gave Him the silver cross of her rosary, she was but realising His
own words: 'Inasmuch as ye shall do it unto the least of these
little ones, ye shall do it unto Me.' Charity, according to her
conception, consisted in giving to Christ. He had first taught this
duty; He would make it the test of all duty at the last day.
Catherine was charitable for the love of Christ. She thought less of
the beggar than of her Lord. How could she do otherwise than see the
aureole about His forehead, and hear the voice of Him who had
declared, 'Behold, I am with you, even to the end of the world.'
Those were times of childlike simplicity when the eye of love was
still unclouded, when men could see beyond the phantoms of this
world, and stripping off the accidents of matter, gaze upon the
spiritual and eternal truths that lie beneath. Heaven lay around
them in that infancy of faith; nor did they greatly differ from the
saints and f