of the soul.  As each carefully chosen and sagaciously suggested scene was presented, he had to identify his very being, soul, will, intellect, and senses, with the mental vision.  He lived again, so far as this was possible through fancy, the facts of sacred history.  If the director judged it advisable, symbolic objects were placed before him in the cell; at one time skulls and bones, at another fresh sweetsmelling flowers.  Fasting and flagellation, peculiar postures of the body, groanings and weepings, were prescribed as mechanical aids in cases where the soul seemed sluggish.  The sphere traversed in these exercises was a narrow one.  The drill aimed at intensity of discipline, at a concentrated and concrete impression, not at width of education or at intellectual enlightenment.  Speculation upon the fundamental principles of religion was excluded.  God’s dealings with mankind revealed in the Old Testament found no place in this theory of salvation.  Attention was riveted upon a very few points in the life of Christ and Mary, such as every Catholic child might be supposed to be familiar with.  But it was fixed in such a way as to bring the terrors and raptures of the mystics, of a S. Catharine or a S. Teresa, within the reach of all; to place spiritual experience a la portee de tout le monde.  The vulgarity is only equaled by the ingenuity and psychological adroitness of the method.  The soul inspired with carnal dread of the doom impending over it, passed into almost physical contact with the incarnate Saviour.  The designed effect was to induce a vivid and varied hypnotic dream of thirty days, from the influence of which a man should never wholly free himself.  The end at which he arrived upon this path of self-scrutiny and materialistic realization, was the conclusion that his highest hope, his most imperative duty, lay in the resignation of his intellect and will to spiritual guidance, and in blind obedience to the Church.  Thousands and thousands of souls in the modern world have passed through this discipline; and those who responded to it best, have ever been selected, when this was possible, as novices of the Order.  The director had ample opportunity of observing at each turn in the process whether his neophyte displayed a likely disposition.

When the Exercitia had been performed, there was an end of asceticism.  Ignatius, as we have seen, dreaded nothing more than the intrusion of that dark spirit into his Company; he aimed at nothing more earnestly than at securing agreeable manners, a cheerful temper, and ability for worldly business in its members.