His first intention was to set sail for Palestine, with the object of preaching to the infidels.  But the plague prevented him from leaving port; and he retired to a Dominican convent at Manresa, a little town of Catalonia, north-west of Barcelona.  Here he abandoned himself to the crudest self-discipline.  Feeding upon bread and water, kneeling for seven hours together rapt in prayer, scourging his flesh thrice daily, and reducing sleep to the barest minimum, Ignatius sought by austerity to snatch that crown of sainthood which he felt to be his due.  Outraged nature soon warned him that he was upon a path which led to failure.  Despair took possession of his soul, sometimes prompting him to end his life by suicide, sometimes plaguing him with hideous visions.  At last he fell dangerously ill.  Enlightened by the expectation of early death, he then became convinced that his fanatical asceticism was a folly.  The despair, the dreadful phantoms which had haunted him, were ascribed immediately to the devil.  In those rarer visitings of brighter visions, which sometimes brought consolation, bidding him repose upon God’s mercy, he recognized angels sent to lead him on the pathway of salvation.  God’s hand appeared in these dealings; and he resolved to dedicate his body as well as his soul to God’s service, respecting both as instruments of the divine will, and entertaining both in efficiency for the work required of them.

The experiences of Manresa proved eminently fruitful for the future method of Ignatius.  It was here that he began to regard self-discipline and self-examination as the needful prelude to a consecrated life.  It was here that he learned to condemn the ascetism of anchorites as pernicious or unprofitable to a militant Christian.  It was here that, while studying the manual of devotion written by Garcia de Cisneros, he laid foundations for those famous Exercitia, which became his instrument for rapidly passing neophytes through spiritual training similar to his own.  It was here that he first distinguished two kinds of visions, infernal and celestial.  Here also he grew familiar with the uses of concrete imagination;, and understood how the faculty of sensuous realization might be made a powerful engine for presenting the past of sacred history or the dogmas of orthodox theology under shapes of fancy to the mind.  Finally, in all the experiences of Manresa, he tried the temper of his own character, which was really not that of a poet or a mystic, but of a sagacious man of action, preparing a system calculated to subjugate the intelligence and will of millions.  Tested by self-imposed sufferings and by diseased hallucinations, his sound sense, the sense of one destined to control men, gathered energy, and grew in, solid strength:  yet enough remained of his fanaticism to operate as a motive force in the scheme which he afterwards developed; enough survived from the ascetic phase he had surmounted, to make him comprehend that some such agony as he