ools and upright wooden arm-chairs of
tolerable comfort; a table was placed at the further end, on which stood
a realistic Spanish crucifix with two tapers always burning before it;
and a little jar of fragrant herbs. Then there was the continual sense of
slight personal danger that is such a spur to refined natures; here was a
Catholic house, of which every member was strictly subject to penalties,
and above all one of that mysterious Society of Jesus, the very vanguard
of the Catholic army, and of which every member was a picked and trained
champion. Then there was the amazing enthusiasm, experience, and skill of
Father Robert, as he called himself; who knew human nature as an
anatomist knows the structure of the human body; to whom the bewildering
tangle of motives, good, bad and indifferent, in the soul, was as plain
as paths in a garden; who knew what human nature needed, what it could
dispense with, what was its power of resistance; and who had at his
disposal for the storming of the soul an armoury of weapons and engines,
every specimen of which he had tested and wielded over and over again.
Little as Anthony knew it, Father Robert, during the first two days after
his arrival, had occupied himself with sounding and probing the lad's
soul, trying his intellect by questions that scarcely seemed to be so,
taking the temperature of his emotional nature by tales and adroit
remarks, and watching the effect of them; in short, with studying the
soul who had come for his treatment as a careful doctor examines the
health of a new patient before he issues his prescription. And then,
lastly, there were the Exercises themselves, a mighty weapon in any
hands; and all but irresistible when directed by the skill, and inspired
by the enthusiasm and sincere piety of such a man as Father Robert.

The Exercises fell into three parts, each averaging in Anthony's case
about five days. First came the Purgative Exercises: the object of these
was to cleanse and search out the very recesses of the soul; as fire
separates gold from alloy.

As Anthony knelt in the little room before the Crucifix day by day, it
seemed to him as if the old conventional limitations and motives of
action and control were rolling back, revealing the realities of the
spiritual world. The Exercises began with an elaborate exposition of the
End of man--which may be roughly defined as the Glory of God attained
through the saving and sanctifying of the individual. Ev