Page:Primitive Culture Vol 2.djvu/429

Rh and consequence have held their places in Christendom. Thus Michael the Archangel, with sword in right hand and scales in left, appears to a certain priest of Siponte, who during a twelvemonth's course of prayer and fasting had been asking if he would have a temple built in his honour: —

'precibus jejunia longis Addiderat, totoque orans se afflixerat anno.'

Reading the narratives of the wondrous sights seen by St. Theresa and her companions, how the saint went in spirit into hell and saw the darkness and fire and unutterable despair, how she had often by her side her good patrons Peter and Paul, how when she was raised in rapture above the grate at the nunnery where she was to take the sacrament, Sister Mary Baptist and others being present, they saw an angel by her with a golden fiery dart at the end whereof was a little fire, and he thrust it through her heart and bowels and pulled them out with it, leaving her wholly inflamed with a great love of God — the modern reader naturally looks for details of physical condition and habit of life among the sisterhood, and as naturally finds that St. Theresa was of morbid constitution and subject to trances from her childhood, in after life subduing her flesh by long watchings and religious discipline, and keeping severe fast during eight months of the year. It is needless to multiply such mediæval records of fasts which have produced their natural effects in beatific vision — are they not written page after page in the huge folios of the Bollandists? So long as fasting is continued as a religious rite, so long its consequences in morbid mental exaltation will continue the old and savage doctrine that morbid phantasy is supernatural experience. Bread and meat would have robbed the ascetic of many an angel's visit; the opening of the refectory door must many a time have closed the gates of heaven to his gaze.