“As I walked,” said the Blessed Angela, “by the way of penitence, I took eighteen spiritual steps before I came to _know_ the imperfections of my life.” This is the first sentence of the book of _Conversion and Penitence_ which analyses in detail the changes through which she passed on her way to complete self-knowledge and self-adjustment. Those “eighteen steps” extended over many years. When they began, Angela was living luxuriously, as a married woman, in her husband’s house. When they ended, she was a poor widow vowed to the religious life; stripped of every superfluity, everything that would entangle her in the web of appearance, apt in contemplation, companioned by visions, esteemed as a teacher and an ecstatic, and the centre of a group of disciples. Her inner life, during these years of ascent, of hard and difficult growth, seems to have been a life of bitter and almost continuous struggle. Even after the preliminary steps of repentance were over, and her visionary powers had developed, the new spiritual ideals demanded of her ever more difficult renunciations. We see her, as we read the wonderful memoirs of her years of penitence, perpetually flung to and fro between adoration and contrition; as first one element and then the other of her complex personality took the upper hand. In her long and slow ascent towards the stars, she alternately experienced the sunshine and the shade. From the turmoil which surrounded the hard re-making of Angela’s character, there emerged two great principles round which her subsequent life and teaching were to be grouped. The first was poverty, the second was self-knowledge. Naturally her instinct for poverty would be fostered by her Franciscan environment; but it is an instinct implicit in the mystical temperament, and not peculiar to the Poor Man of Assisi. Mystics know that possessions dissipate the energy which they need for other and more real things; that they must give up ownership, the verb “to have,” if they are to attain the freedom which they seek, and all the fullness of the verb “to be.” Thus Jacopone in his great ode expressed a universal spiritual law: “Povertate è nulla avere e nulla cosa poi volere; ed omne cosa possedere en spirito de libertate.” It cost Angela many struggles before she fully accepted and acted upon this truth, and attained that which she calls the “liberty of poverty.” Self-knowledge, that hard essential of the soul’s re-education which Richard of St. Victor, and afterwards St. Catherine of Siena, made the starting-point of all mysticism, she recognized from the first as the true objective towards which her hard penances and long meditations must tend.