Page:The Romance of Isabel, Lady Burton.djvu/805

Rh of the race of very small account when weighed against the hope of victory. Lady Burton was one of these; she had her feet firm set upon the everlasting Rock. The teaching of her Church was to her divinest truth. The supernatural was real, the spiritual actual. The conflict between the powers of light and the powers of darkness, between good angels and evil angels, between benign influences and malefic forces, was no figure of speech with her, but a reality. In these last years of her life more especially the earthly veil seemed to have fallen from her eyes. She seemed to have grasped something of the vision of the servant of Elisha, for whom the prophet prayed: "Lord, I pray Thee, open his eyes, that he may see. And the Lord opened the eyes of the young man; and he saw: and, behold, the mountain was full of horses and chariots of fire round about Elisha."

Because of all this, because her religion was such an actuality to her, is, I think, due half the misunderstandings which have arisen with regard to Lady Burton's attitude towards so-called "spiritualism." She always held that Catholicism was the highest form of spiritualism—using the word in its highest meaning—and from this attitude she never wavered. She had lived much in the East, and had come much into contact with oriental occult influences, but what she saw only served to convince her more of the truths of her religion. Lady Burton was a Christian mystic, not in the vulgar sense of the word, but only in the sense that many devout and religious women have been Christian mystics too. Like Saint Catherine of