When we read of a man who, for many years, wore on his left arm an iron bracelet, with spikes on the inside which were pressed into the flesh, we feel as though we had taken a long journey from our happy land.  When we read that the bracelet was made of steel wire, with the points specially sharpened, and the whole so clamped on to the arm that it could never come off, but had to be cut away after death, we might suppose that we had reached the world where Yogi and Sanyasi wander in the saffron robe, or sit besmeared with ashes, contemplating the eternal verities, unmoved by outward things.  Like skeletons of death they sit; thorns tear their skin, their nails pierce into their hands, day and night one arm is held uplifted, iron grows embedded in their flesh, like a railing in a tree trunk, they hang in ecstasy from hooks, they count their thousand miles of pilgrimage by the double yard-measure of head to heel, moving like a geometer caterpillar across the burning dust.  To overcome the body so that the soul may win her freedom, to mortify—­to murder the flesh so that the spirit may reach its perfect life, to torture sense so that the mind may dwell in peace, to obliterate the limits of space, to silence the ticking of time, so that eternity may speak, and vistas of infinity be revealed—­that is the purport of their existence, and in hope of attaining to that consummation they submit themselves with deliberate resolve to the utmost anguish and abasement that the body can endure.

Contemplating from a philosophic distance the Buddhist monasteries that climb the roof of the world, or the indistinguishable multitudes swarming around the shrines on India’s coral strand, we think all this sort of thing is natural enough for unhappy natives to whom life is always poor and hard, and whose bodies, at the best, are so insignificant and so innumerable that they may well regard them with contempt, and suffer their torments with indifference.  But the man of whose spiky bracelet we read was not in search of Nirvana’s annihilation, nor had he ever prayed in nakedness beside the Ganges.  Cardinal Vaughan, Archbishop of Westminster, was as little like a starveling Sanyasi as any biped descendant of the anthropoids could possibly be.  A noticeable man, singularly handsome, of conspicuous, indeed of almost precarious, personal attraction, a Prince of the Church, clothed, quite literally, in purple and fine linen, faring as sumptuously as he pleased every day, welcome at the tables of the society that is above religion, irreproachable in address, a courtier in manner, a diplomatist in mind, moving in an entourage of state and worldly circumstance, occupied in the arts, constructing the grandest building of his time, learned without pedantry, agreeably cultivated in knowledge, urbane in his judgment of mankind, a power in the councils of his country, a voice in the destinies of the world—­so we see him moving in a large and splendid orbit, complete in fine activities, dominant in his assured position, almost superhuman in success.  And as he moves, he presses into the flesh of his left arm those sharpened points of steel.