ndria, something similar had already occurred. There another
Hypathia, fair as she, refused Christianity, refused also marriage. God
did not appeal to her, man did not either. But a priest succeeded in
interesting her in the possibility of obtaining a husband superior to
every mortal being on condition only that she prayed to Mary. The girl did
pray. During the prayer she fell asleep. Then beautiful beyond all beauty
the Lord appeared to whom the Virgin offered the girl. The Christ refused.
She was fair but not fair enough. At that she awoke. Immortally lovely and
mortally sad she suffered the priest to baptize her. Another prayer
followed by another sleep ensued in which she beheld again the Christ who
then consenting to take her, put on her finger a ring which she found on
awakening.

The legend, which afterward inspired Veronese and Correggio, had a
counterpart in that of St. Catherine of Sienna. To her also the Christ
gave a ring, yet one which, Della Fonte, her biographer, declared, was
visible only to herself. The legend had also a pendant in the story of St.
Theresa, a Spanish mystic, who in her trances discovered that the
punishment of the damned is an inability to love. In the _Relacion de su
vida_ the saint expressed herself as follows:

"It seemed to me as though I could see my soul, clearly, like a mirror,
and that in the centre of it the Lord came. It seemed to me that in every
part of my soul I saw him as I saw him in the mirror and that mirror, I
cannot say how, was wholly absorbed by the Lord, indescribably, in a sort
of amorous confusion."

The mirror was the imagination, the usual reflector of the beatific. It
was that perhaps to which Paul referred when he said that we see through a
glass darkly. But it was certainly that which enabled Gerson to catalogue
the various degrees of ravishment of which the highest, ecstasy,
culminates in union with Christ, where the soul attaining perfection is
freed.

Gerson came later but theories similar to his, which neoplatonism had
advanced, were common. In that day or more exactly in that night, the
silver petals of the lily of purity were plucked so continuously by so
many hands, so many were the eyes strained on the mirror, so frequent were
the brides of Christ, that the aberration became as disquieting as
asceticism. Then through fear that woman might lose herself in dreams of
spiritual love and evaporate completely, an effort was attempted which
succeeded pr