In the next place, all the relations of visions seen in "extasy," and of conversations held, and sensations suffered during them, may—due consideration being given to what we know of the patient—be accepted as not only possible but exceedingly probable. And this category will comprise the greatest part of the whole budget of wonders. Even in those cases, in which an abiding evidence of what had happened to her in trance is said to have remained appreciable only by her own senses, as in the case of the marriage ring, and the pain after the infliction of the stigmata; those most able to form an opinion on such matters, will not think, probably, that it is attributing too much to the imagination of a cataleptic patient, living on raw vegetables, wholly without active occupation, and engrossed by a series of highly exciting thoughts on one ever-present subject of a mystical and transcendental nature, to suppose that she may have in all sincerity imagined herself to see and to feel as she described. [Sidenote: POSSIBLE EXPLANATION OF MIRACLES.] Of many of the miracles, including some of those most insisted on and boasted of by her biographer,—as for instance of the restoration of her mother to life,—a natural explanation, not necessarily involving any intentional falsehood, is so obvious, as to need no pointing. And others may, without any great improbability, be referred to mistake, inaccuracy, or exaggeration. On the whole, I do not think that the evidence constrains us to convict Catherine of falsehood or imposture in her miraculous pretensions. The impression of her innocence of this cannot, however, I think, be stated in any more forcible form. Few persons, probably, will obtain from an impartial consideration of the story, any satisfactory conviction that she was wholly sincere. We find her guilty of falsehood to her mother at an early period of her life, when she represents herself as frequenting certain hot baths with a different purpose than the real one, which was to burn herself by their heat, as a means of discounting eternal burning hereafter. This deception is related by her confessor as a holy and praiseworthy act. And the whole tenor of his morality, and of that of the school to which he belongs, forbids the idea, that a high reverence for truth, as truth, formed any part of their teaching. There is nothing in all we know of Catherine, either from her own writings, or from those of her biographer, to indicate that her spiritual conceptions, religious system, or theory of morals, differed in any respect from the standard orthodoxy of her time and country. We find no more elevated notions of Deity, no saner views of duty, no nobler beau-ideal of human excellence. Her history may be regarded as the culminating expression of the ascetic divinity of that age. She lived wholly surrounded by, and devoted (very literally) body and soul, to a fiercely fanatical community, eager and conscientiously bound to advance their system and