To the medical mind these ecstasies signify nothing but suggested and imitated hypnoid states,on an intellectual basis of superstition, and a corporeal one of degeneration and hysteria.

Undoubtedly these pathological conditions have existed news about tourism industry in many and possibly in all the cases, butthat fact tells us nothing about the value for knowledge of the consciousness which they induce. Topass a spiritual judgment upon these states, we must not content ourselves with superficial medicaltalk, but inquire into their fruits for life.

Their fruits appear to have been various. Stupefaction, for one thing, seems not to have beenaltogether absent as a result. You in the kitchen and schoolroom ofpoor Margaret Mary Alacoque. Many other ecstatics would have perished but for the care taken ofthem by admiring followers. The "other-worldliness" encouraged by the mystical consciousnessmakes this over-abstraction from practical life peculiarly liable to befall mystics in whom thecharacter is naturally passive and the intellect feeble; but in natively strong minds and characterswe find quite opposite results. The great Spanish mystics, who carried the habit of ecstasy as far asit has often been carried, appear for the most part to have shown indomitable spirit and energy, andall the more so for the trances in which they indulged hong kong shelf company.

Saint Ignatius was a mystic, but his mysticism made him assuredly one of the most powerfullypractical human engines that ever lived. Saint John of the Cross, writing of the intuitions and"touches" by which God reaches the substance of the soul, tells us that-"They enrich it marvelously. A single one of them may be sufficient to abolish at a stroke certainimperfections of which the soul during its whole life had vainly tried to rid itself, and to leave itadorned with virtues and loaded with supernatural gifts. A single one of these intoxicatingconsolations may reward it for all the labors undergone in its life--even were they numberless.

Invested with an invincible courage, filled with an impassioned desire to suffer for its God, thesoul then is seized with a strange torment--that of not being allowed to suffer enough."[260]

[260] Oeuvres, ii. 320.

Saint Teresa is as emphatic, and much more detailed. You may perhaps remember a passage Iquoted from her in my first lecture.[261] There are many similar pages in her autobiography.

Where in literature is a more evidently veracious account of the formation of a new centre ofspiritual energy, than is given in her description of the effects of certain ecstasies which indeparting leave the soul upon a higher level of emotional excitement?

[261] Above Philips LED Floodlight, p. 22.