She had, too, and in a marked degree, the peculiarly sensitive psychic organization which is observed in many of the historic mystics. A long and severe nervous illness had followed her sister’s departure for the cloister. It was cured by a form of auto-suggestion for which many parallels can be found in the history of adult religious experience; though few in that of children of her age. This incident Thérèse has described in her memoirs with great clearness and honesty. At a crisis of the sickness, when she was reduced to utter misery and weakness and tormented by hallucinations and fears, her three sisters came to her room and knelt before the statue of the Blessed Virgin, praying for her cure. The sick child, praying too as well as she could, suddenly saw the statue take life and advance towards her with a smile. Instantly the prayer was answered, her pains and delusions left her, and she was cured. The “vision” being told—and of course accepted at face-value as a supernatural grace—marked Thérèse from this time as a privileged soul. It certainly indicated in her an abnormal suggestibility, comparable with that which is revealed by the somewhat similar incident in the life of Julian of Norwich, and was not without importance for her future development. The religious transformation and exaltation so often experienced in adolescence is seen in Thérèse in its most intense form. It was initiated when she was thirteen by another nervous illness, apparently brought on by a morbid brooding on her own supposed imperfections—the spiritual ailment well known to religious directors as “scrupulosity”—and it was from this period that she afterwards dated the beginning of her real spiritual life. The childish determination to become a Carmelite had now grown in strength, and when she was fourteen she broke to her father her own violent consciousness of vocation; a certitude which nothing could shake. Her inner life was at this time astonishingly mature. She was not a prig, but a sensitive and affectionate little girl; yet her autobiography is full of sayings which surprise us by their depth and wisdom, when we remember the age of the child who thought and said them. By the constant practice of small renunciations, self-denial was now habitual to her; for it was by that which she called the “little pathway” of incessant but inconspicuous sacrifices and kind deeds, and not by any abnormal austerities or devotions, that her character was formed. Though perfectly free from all spiritual pride, she was, moreover, quite certain of her own communion with the Divine order, and of the authority of the impressions which she received from it. “En ce temps-là, je n’osais rien dire de mes sentiments intérieurs; la voie par laquelle je marchais était si droite, si lumineuse, que je ne sentais pas le besoin d’un autre guide que Jésus ... je pensais que pour moi, le bon Dieu ne se servait pas d’intermédiaire, mais agissait directement.”