But the letters show us that this faith was not won nor kept without sharp struggle. We have in them no presentation of a calm spirit, established on tranquil heights of unchanging vision, above our "mortal moral strife." Catherine is, as we can see, a woman of many moods--very sensitive, very loving. She shows a touching dependence on those she loves, and an inveterate habit of idealising them, which leads to frequent disillusion. She is extremely eager and intense about little things as well as great; hers is a truly feminine seriousness over the detail of living. She is keenly and humanly interested in life on this earth, differing in this respect from some canonized persons who seem always to be enduring it _faute de mieux_. And, as happens to all sensitive people who refuse to seclude themselves in dreams, life went hard with her. Hers was a frail and suffering body, and a tossed and troubled spirit; wounded in the house of her friends, beset by problem, shaken with doubt and fear by the spectacle presented to her by the world and the Church of Christ. The letters tell us how these, her sorrows and temptations, were not separated from the life of faith, but a true portion of it: how she carried them into the Divine Presence, and what high reassurance awaited her there. Ordinary mortals are inclined to think that supernatural experience removes the saints to a perplexing distance. In Catherine's case, however, we become aware as we study the record that it brings her nearer us. For these experiences, far from being independent of her outer life, are in closest relation with it; even the highest and most mysterious, even those in which the symbolism seems most remote from the modern mind, can be translated by the psychologist without difficulty into modern terms. They spring from the problems of her active life; they bring her renewed strength and wisdom for her practical duties. An age, which like our own places peculiar emphasis and value on the type of sanctity which promptly expresses itself through the deed, should feel for Catherine Benincasa an especial honour. She is one of the purest of Contemplatives; she knows, what we to-day too often forget, that the task is impossible without the vision. But it follows directly upon the vision, and this great mediaeval mystic is one of the most efficient characters of her age. IV Catherine's soaring imagination lifted her above the circle of purely personal interests, and made her a force of which history is cognisant in the public affairs of her day. She is one of a very small number of women who have exerted the influence of a statesman by virtue, not of feminine attractions, but of conviction and intellectual power. It is impossible to understand her letters without some recognition of the public drama of the time.