Page:Gesta Romanorum - Swan - Wright - 1.djvu/500

326 and stripes. We do not learn whether the master was necessitated to quicken his scholar's diligence in the way suggested, but it is certain that he now proceeded in his studies with much greater facility. About this time, he read the Enchiridion Militis Christiani of Erasmus, which had been recommended to him, but finding that it wanted fervour, and in fact, diminished his devotion and exercises of piety, (and was probably reducing him to a reasonable Christian) he threw away the book, and conceived such a horror of it, that he would never read it more, and when he became General of the Jesuits, ordered that the society should not read the works of Erasmus. Being reestablished in his health, he renewed his austerities, but, for the sake of study, retrenched a part of his seven hours of prayer. John Pascal, a devout youth, the son of the woman with whom he lodged, would frequently rise in the night to observe what Ignatius was doing in his chamber, and sometimes he saw him on his knees, at others, prostrate on the ground, and once he thought he saw him elevated from the earth, and surrounded with light, or as Butler expresses it in his Hudibras,