d we feel that
saintliness of character may yield almost absolutely worthless fruits
if it be associated with such inferior intellectual sympathies. What
with science, idealism, and democracy, our own imagination has grown to
need a God of an entirely different temperament from that Being
interested exclusively in dealing out personal favors, with whom our
ancestors were so contented. Smitten as we are with the vision of
social righteousness, a God indifferent to everything but adulation,
and full of partiality for his individual favorites, lacks an essential
element of largeness; and even the best professional sainthood of
former centuries, pent in as it is to such a conception, seems to us
curiously shallow and unedifying.

[205] Examples: "Suffering from a headache, she sought, for the glory
of God, to relieve herself by holding certain odoriferous substances in
her mouth, when the Lord appeared to her to lean over towards her
lovingly, and to find comfort Himself in these odors. After having
gently breathed them in, He arose, and said with a gratified air to the
Saints, as if contented with what He had done: 'see the new present
which my betrothed has given Me!'

"One day, at chapel, she heard supernaturally sung the words 'Sanctus,
Sanctus, Sanctus.' The son of God leaning towards her like a sweet
lover, and giving to her soul the softest kiss, said to her at the
second Sanctus: 'In this Sanctus addressed to my person, receive with
this kiss all the sanctity of my divinity and of my humanity, and let
it be to thee a sufficient preparation for approaching the communion
table.' And the next following Sunday, while she was thanking God for
this favor, behold the Son of God, more beauteous than thousands of
angels, takes her in His arms as if He were proud of her and presents
her to God the Father, in that perfection of sanctity with which He had
dowered her. And the Father took such delight in this soul thus
presented by His only son, that, as if unable longer to restrain
Himself, He gave her, and the Holy Ghost gave her also, the sanctity
attributed to each by His own Sanctus--and thus she remained endowed
with the plenary fullness of the blessing of Sanctity, bestowed on her
by Omnipotence, by Wisdom, and by Love." Revelations de Sainte
Gertrude, Paris, 1898, i. 44, 186.

Take Saint Teresa, for example, one of the ablest women, in many
respects, of whose life we have the record. She had a powerful
in