nd popes. In
the midst of this varied and distracting career she continued to see
visions and to fast and scourge herself. The domestic virtues and
the personal wants and wishes of a woman were annihilated in her:
she lived for the Church, for the poor, and for Christ, whom she
imagined to be constantly supporting her. At length she died, worn
out by inward conflicts, by the tension of religious ecstasy, by
want of food and sleep, and by the excitement of political life. To
follow her in her public career is not my purpose. It is well known
how, by the power of her eloquence and the ardour of her piety, she
succeeded as a mediator between Florence and her native city, and
between Florence and the Pope; that she travelled to Avignon, and
there induced Gregory XI. to put an end to the Babylonian captivity
of the Church by returning to Rome; that she narrowly escaped
political martyrdom during one of her embassies from Gregory to the
Florentine republic; that she preached a crusade against the Turks;
that her last days were clouded with sorrow for the schism which
then rent the Papacy; and that she aided by her dying words to keep
Pope Urban on the Papal throne. When we consider her private and
spiritual life more narrowly, it may well move our amazement to
think that the intricate politics of Central Italy, the counsels of
licentious princes and ambitious Popes, were in any measure guided
and controlled by such a woman. Alone, and aided by nothing but a
reputation for sanctity, she dared to tell the greatest men in
Europe of their faults; she wrote in words of well-assured command,
and they, demoralised, worldly, sceptical, or indifferent as they
might be, were yet so bound by superstition that they could not
treat with scorn the voice of an enthusiastic girl.

Absolute disinterestedness, the belief in her own spiritual mission,
natural genius, and that vast power which then belonged to all
energetic members of the monastic orders, enabled her to play this
part. She had no advantages to begin with. The daughter of a
tradesman overwhelmed with an almost fabulously numerous progeny,
Catherine grew up uneducated. When her genius had attained maturity,
she could not even read or write. Her biographer asserts that she
learned to do so by a miracle. Anyhow, writing became a most potent
instrument in her hands; and we possess several volumes of her
epistles, as well as a treatise of mystical theology. To conquer
self-love as t