Very amusing, is it not?  To have one’s mother, husband, children die—­the most commonplace sort of things—­what (over one’s wine and walnuts) one describes as being “alone and sorrowful.”  Men who having tasted the blessings conveyed in those few words, have also found the horror conveyed in them, have no epithets for the state of mind in which such a fate would leave them.  They simply pray that if that hour came, they might just have faith enough left not to curse God and die.  Amusing, too, her falling ill, and suffering under a complication of disorders, especially if those disorders were the fruit of combined grief and widowhood.  Amusing also her betaking herself to violent devotion!  In the first place, if devotion be a good thing, could she have too much of it?  If it be the way to make people good (as is commonly held by all Christian sects), could she become too good?  The more important question which springs out of the fact we will ask presently.  “She has rapturous consolations and terrific temptations.”  Did the consolations come first, and were the temptations a revulsion from “spiritual” exaltation into “spiritual” collapse and melancholy? or did the temptations come first, and the consolations come after, to save her from madness and despair?  Either may be the case; perhaps both were:  but somewhat more of care should have been taken in expressing so important a spiritual sequence as either case exhibits.

It is twelve years and more since we studied the history of the “B.  Angela de Foligni,” and many another kindred saint; and we cannot recollect what were the terrific temptations, what was the floor of hell which the poor thing saw yawning beneath her feet.  But we must ask Mr. Vaughan, has he ever read Boccaccio, or any of the Italian novelists up to the seventeenth century?  And if so, can he not understand how Angela de Foligni, the lovely Italian widow of the fourteenth century, had her terrific temptations, to which, if she had yielded, she might have fallen to the lowest pit of hell, let that word mean what it may; and temptations all the more terrific because she saw every widow round her considering them no temptations at all, but yielding to them, going out to invite them in the most business-like, nay, duty-like, way?  What if she had “rapturous consolations”?  What if she did pour out to One who was worthy not of less but of more affection than she offered in her passionate southern heart, in language which in our colder northerns would be mere hypocrisy, yet which she had been taught to believe lawful by that interpretation of the Canticles which (be it always remembered) is common to Evangelicals and to Romanists?  What if even, in reward for her righteous belief, that what she saw all widows round her doing was abominable and to be avoided at all risks, she were permitted to enjoy a passionate affection, which after all was not misplaced?  There are mysteries in religion as in all things, where it is better not to intrude behind the veil.  Wisdom is justified of all her children:  and folly may be justified of some of her children also.