Freaks of Fanaticism, and Other Strange EventsBaring-Gould, S. (Sabine)
Religion
Freaks of Fanaticism, and Other Strange Events
Baring-Gould, S. (Sabine)
History; Mysticism; Patarines
Another inmate of the house was Ursula Kündig, who entered it at the
age of nineteen, and lived there as a veritable maid-of-all-work,
though paid no wages. This damsel was of the sweetest, gentlest
disposition. Her parish pastor gave testimony to her, "She was
always so good that even scandal-mongers were unable to find
occasion for slander in her conduct." Her countenance was full of
intelligence, purity, and had in it a nobility above her birth and
education. Her home had been unhappy; she had been engaged to be
married to a young man, but finding that he did not care for her,
and sought only her small property, she broke off the engagement,
to her father's great annoyance. It was owing to a quarrel at home
relative to this, that she went to Wildisbuch to entreat Margaretta
Peter to be "her spiritual guide through life into eternity."
Ursula had at first only paid occasional visits to Wildisbuch, but
gradually these visits became long, and finally she took up her
residence in the house. The soul of the unhappy girl was as wax in
the hands of the saint, whom she venerated with intensest admiration
as the Elect of the Lord; and she professed her unshaken conviction
"that Christ revealed Himself in the flesh through her, and that
through her many thousands of souls were saved." The house at
Wildisbuch became thenceforth a great gathering place for all the
spiritually-minded in the neighbourhood, who desired instruction,
guidance, enlightenment, and Margaretta, the high priestess of
mysticism to all such as could find no satisfaction for the deepest
hunger of their souls in the Zwinglian services of their parish
church.
Man is composed of two parts; he has a spiritual nature which he
shares with the angels, and an animal nature that he possesses in
common with the beasts. There is in him, consequently, a double
tendency, one to the indefinite, unconfined, spiritual; the other
to the limited, sensible and material. The religious history of
all times shows us this higher nature striving after emancipation
from the law of the body, and never succeeding in accomplishing
the escape, always falling back, like Dædalus, into destruction,
when attempting to defy the laws of nature and soar too near to
the ineffable light. The mysticism of the old heathen world, the
mysticism of the Gnostic sects, the mysticism of mediæval heretics,
almost invariably resolved itself into orgies of licentiousness. God
has bound soul and body together, and an attempt to dissociate them
in religion is fatally doomed to ruin.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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