Within the Christian Church, and especially in that which is technically called the “religious life,” these symbols and this law have not varied for many centuries; nor has the type of personality which they develop changed much since it first appeared in monastic history. The sharp sense of close communion with, and immediate responsibility to, a personal God possessing human attributes; the complete abandonment of desire, combined with astonishing tenacity of purpose; contempt for the merely comfortable either in spiritual or physical affairs; a glad and eager acceptance of pain—these are the qualities of the Christian saint, and these are still fostered in appropriate subjects by the cloistered life. These facts have been abundantly demonstrated during the last thirty years in a group of French Carmelite mystics, of whom the best known is Thérèse Martin, already the object of a widespread _cultus_ under the name of Sœur Thérése de l’Enfant Jésus. Others who will repay study are Elizabeth Catez, or Sœur Elizabeth de la Trinité (1880-1906) and Mère Marie-Ange de l’Enfant-Jésus (1881-1909). It is clear that we have in these young women—for they all died before they were thirty years of age—a genuine renaissance of traditional Catholic mysticism. Their experience exhibits many close correspondences with that of the great mystics of the past; the same development of the interior life can be traced in them, and they knew at first hand some at least among those forms of spiritual consciousness which are described by Ruysbroeck, Angela of Foligno, St. Teresa, and St. John of the Cross. The first in time and in importance—for the others depended to a greater or less degree on her influence and example—was Thérèse Martin, who was born at Alençon in 1873 and died in 1897. The last nine years of her life were spent in the Carmelite Convent of Lisieux in Normandy; and she there wrote the spiritual autobiography, _L’histoire d’une âme_, which has since been translated into every European language. In her life—which shows with exceptional clearness the reality and driving power of that instinct which is known as religious vocation—and in the incidents connected with her death and _cultus_, we find many suggestive parallels with the histories of the historical saints. These parallels often help us to determine the true meaning of statements in those histories; indicating the possible origin of much that now appears extravagant and abnormal, and restoring to their real position in the human race men and women who dropped their living characteristics in ascending to the altars of the Church.