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pieties, masses and prayers and sacraments and mortifications, and only
then for the first time since he had brooded on the great mystery of
love did he feel within him a warm movement like that of some newly
born life or virtue of the soul itself. The attitude of rapture in
sacred art, the raised and parted hands, the parted lips and eyes as of
one about to swoon, became for him an image of the soul in prayer,
humiliated and faint before her Creator.

But he had been forewarned of the dangers of spiritual exaltation and
did not allow himself to desist from even the least or lowliest
devotion, striving also by constant mortification to undo the sinful
past rather than to achieve a saintliness fraught with peril. Each of
his senses was brought under a rigorous discipline. In order to mortify
the sense of sight he made it his rule to walk in the street with
downcast eyes, glancing neither to right nor left and never behind him.
His eyes shunned every encounter with the eyes of women. From time to
time also he balked them by a sudden effort of the will, as by lifting
them suddenly in the middle of an unfinished sentence and closing the
book. To mortify his hearing he exerted no control over his voice which
was then breaking, neither sang nor whistled, and made no attempt to
flee from noises which caused him painful nervous irritation such as
the sharpening of knives on the knife board, the gathering of cinders
on the fire-shovel and the twigging of the carpet. To mortify his smell
was more difficult as he found in himself no instinctive repugnance to
bad odours whether they were the odours of the outdoor world, such as
those of dung or tar, or the odours of his own person among which he
had made many curious comparisons and experiments. He found in the end
that the only odour against which his sense of smell revolted was a
certain stale fishy stink like that of long-standing urine; and
whenever it was possible he subjected himself to this unpleasant odour.
To mortify the taste he practised strict habits at table, observed to
the letter all the fasts of the church and sought by distraction to
divert his mind from the savours of different foods. But it was to the
mortification of touch he brought the most assiduous ingenuity of
inventiveness. He never consciously changed his position in bed, sat in
the most uncomfortable positions, suffered patiently every itch and
pain, kept away from the fire, remained on his knees all t