At the verge of madness, Ignatius paused. That noble intellect was not to be whelmed beneath the tempest in which so many have sunk, nor was his deliverance to be accomplished by any vulgar methods. Standing on the steps of a Dominican church, he recited the office of Our Lady, when suddenly heaven itself was laid open to the eyes of the worshiper. That ineffable mystery which the author of the Athanasian creed has labored in vain to enunciate in words, was disclosed to him as an object, not of faith, but of actual sight. To his spiritualized sense was disclosed the actual process by which the host is transubstantiated, and the other Christian verities which it is permitted to common man to receive but as exercises of their belief, became to him the objects of immediate inspection and of direct consciousness. For eight successive days his body reposed in an unbroken trance, while his spirit thus imbibed disclosures for which the tongues of men have no appropriate language. Ignatius returned to this sublunary sphere with a mission not unmeet for an envoy from the empyrean world, of which he had thus become a temporary denizen. He returned to earth to establish a theocracy, of which he should himself be the first administrator, and to which every tribe and kindred of men should be subject. He returned no longer a sordid, half-distracted anchorite, but, strange to tell, a man distinguished not more by the gigantic magnitude of his designs than by the clear good sense, the profound sagacity, the calm perseverance, and the flexible address with which he was to pursue them. History affords no more perfect illustration how readily delirious enthusiasm and the shrewdness of the exchange may combine and harmonize in minds of the heroic order. A Swedenborg-Franklin reconciling in himself these antagonist propensities is no monster of the fancy.