After a few months he found a cavern outside the town, at the foot of the hills, and entered upon the period of endless prayer and wild austerity in which he wrote his book, the _Spiritual Exercises_. He scourged himself, until the blood came, three times a day: he ate so little, and lived so intense a life, that he was sometimes found unconscious on the floor of the cave, and had to be removed and nursed; his deep black eyes seemed to gleam from the face of a corpse. Thus he lived for six months, and wrote his famous book. I need not analyse that passionate guide to the spiritual life, or consider the legend of its miraculous origin. We know from Benedictine writers that Ignatius had received at Montserrat a copy of the _Exercitatorium_ of their abbot Cisneros, and anyone familiar with Catholic life will know that similar series of "meditations" are, and always have been, very common. There is an original plan in Ignatius's book, and the period during which the mind must successively brood over sin and hell, virtue and heaven, Christ and the devil, is boldly extended to four weeks. These are technicalities;[1] the deeply original thing in the work is its intensity, and for the source of this we need only regard those six months of fierce inner life in the cave near Manresa. In later years Ignatius claimed that the general design of his Society, and even the chief features of its constitution, were revealed to him in that cavern. "I saw it thus at Manresa," he used to say when he was asked why such or such a feature was included. In this he is clearly wrong. His Society was, in essence and details, a regiment enlisted to fight Protestantism, and Ignatius certainly knew nothing of Protestantism as a formidable menace to the Pope's rule in 1522; one may doubt if he was yet aware of the existence of Luther. We may conclude again that he had in mind a vague alternative to his mission to the Mohammedans. Those who are disposed to believe that the Society of Jesus was in any definite sense projected by him at Manresa will find it hard to explain why for five years afterwards he still insisted that his mission was to the Turks.