ocured an old
door to sleep on. In winter he suffered from the frost. His feet were
full of sores, his legs became dropsical, his knees bloody and seared,
his loins covered with scars, his hands tremulous. During twenty years
he fed scantily upon the coarsest food, slept in the most uncomfortable
places, and during the whole of the time never took a bath. No wonder
that after his fortieth year he was favoured with a series of visions
from God. Would not one be surprised if any other result than this had
been achieved? And Suso's case is only one of thousands, many of not so
extreme a character, others quite as bad.

In the case of Catherine of Sienna the austerities began earlier than
with Suso. As a child she flogged herself, and was favoured with visions
before she reached her teens. Santa Teresa, as a young woman, prayed to
God to send her an illness, and describes how she remained for days in a
trance, during which time her tongue was bitten in many places. She
describes how, during these trances, her body became to her light, and
she remained rigid. "It was altogether impossible for me to hinder it;
for my world would be carried absolutely away, and ordinarily even my
head, as it were, after it."[63] These are typical examples from a very
large number of cases. The annals of monasticism are filled with
accounts of self-inflicted tortures, with the one end in view, and in
serious belief that their experiences brought them into touch with a
reality denied them under normal conditions. The practice not only
quickened their own sense of the reality of religion, it served the same
purpose for thousands of others pursuing the course of ordinary social
existence. "Religious teachers," says Francis Galton, "by enforcing
celibacy, fasting, and solitude, have done their best towards making men
mad, and they have always largely succeeded in inducing morbid mental
conditions among their followers."[64]

The phenomenon is thus continuous and, in its essentials, unchanging.
From the most primitive times there has been a close association between
the belief in divine illumination and spiritual intercourse, and mental
states that are unquestionably pathological. Following this there has
been a more or less deliberate cultivation of these states in the desire
to renew communion with a spiritual world hidden from man's normal
senses. In this there need be no deliberate imposture. When imposture
does occur, it would be at a later cu