Of all possible solutions this would be the least compatible with the conditions of the age in which she lived. But the low morality, to which mere purity of life would have appealed in vain, was especially favourable to the powerful and successful operation of another class of the Saint's pretensions. In proportion as the intellectual and moral darkness of men make a spiritual conception of Deity more and more impossible to them, are they prone in the desolation of their unacknowledged, but none the less effective atheism, to accept with ready awe and reverential fear any such gross material manifestations, as profess to reveal to them a God sufficiently ungodly not to be disturbingly out of place in their scheme of life and eternity. Those "ages of faith," therefore, whose title to that appellation consists in their eager readiness to accept and believe any quantity of such miracles as could be conceived to proceed only from the will of a God created in the likeness of a very unspiritual man, were probably as little faithful to any spiritually profitable ideal of the Divine nature, as any generations since the dawn of Christianity. To such ages Catherine was admirably adapted to appeal with remarkable force and success. Her strength of will, and her infirmity of body, both contributed to produce the effect to be explained. The first, as evidenced by the unflinchingly persevering infliction of self-torments, such as would have been wholly intolerable to a weaker will, and by continued exertion under suffering, weakness, and malady, made a large and important part of the saintly character; as the same qualities differently evidenced would have led to eminence in any career, and in any age. But joined to this potent strength of will may be observed evidences of a very remarkable degree of spiritual egotism, and "the pride that apes humility." The poor Sienese dyer's daughter must have been one of those rare natures, to whom the quiet obscure career marked out for them, as it might seem, irrevocably by the circumstances of their birth, was an intolerable impossibility. A woman, poor, plebeian, unlettered, frail in health, and in the fourteenth century! Surely no possible concatenation of circumstances could be devised, from which it would appear so impossible to emerge into power and celebrity! But the "_Io Caterina schiava dei servi di Dio_," of the letters, who thinks that entire nations shall be accepted or rejected as reprobate by the Eternal in accordance with the measure of HER merits or demerits, and who bargains with God to bear in HER own person the sacrilegious sin of a whole revolted people!—this Caterina was one whom no position could doom to the obscurity intolerable to such idiosyncrasies. And she rushed forth with uncontrollable determination on the one only path open to her;—not by any means necessarily with the conscious intention of making hypocritical use of the profession of sanctity for the achievement of