I take it that the most original parts are Chapter Eight, with its analysis of Battista Vernazza’s interesting Diary; the Appendix, with its attempts at fixing the successive authors and intentions that have built up the _Vita e Dottrina_; Chapter Nine, which attempts to assign to psycho-physical matters, as we now know them, their precise place and function within the vast life-system, and according to the practical tests, of the great Mystical Saints; and Chapter Fifteen, with its endeavour to picture that large Asceticism which alone can effect, within the same soul, a fruitful co-habitation of, and interaction between, Social Religion, the Scientific Habit of Mind, and the Mystical Element of Religion. * * * * * Kirkegaard used to claim that he ever wrote _existentially_, pricked on by the exigencies of actual life, to attempt their expression in terms of that life, and in view of its further spiritual development. More than ever the spiritual life appears now as supremely worth the having, and yet it seems to raise, or to find, the most formidable difficulties or even deadlocks. I can but hope that these pages may have so largely sprung from the exigencies of that life itself,--that they may have caught so much of the spirit of the chief livers of the spiritual life, especially of St. Catherine of Genoa and of St. John of the Cross, and, above all, of the One Master and Measure of Christianity and of the Church,--as to stimulate such life, its practice, love and study, in their readers, and may point them, spur them on, through and beyond all that here has been attempted, missed or obscured, to fuller religious insight, force and fruitfulness. FRIEDRICH VON HÜGEL. _Kensington_, _Easter 1908._ “Grant unto men, O God, to perceive in little things the indications, common-seeming though they be, of things both small and great.” ST. AUGUSTINE, _Confessions_, Bk. XI, ch. xxiii, 1. CONTENTS OF THE FIRST VOLUME The frontispiece photogravure reproduces an oil-painting preserved in the sacristy of the Santissima Annunciata in Portorio, the Church of the Pammatone Hospital in Genoa. This painting is probably a copy (perhaps not older than 1737) of the portrait which hangs in the superioress’s room in the same hospital, and which is presumably the picture referred to by documents as extant in 1512, eighteen months after Catherine’s death. The copy has been reproduced in preference to the original, because the original has been considerably and clumsily restored, whereas the copy gives us the older portrait as it existed before this restoration. PAGE PART I.--INTRODUCTION CHAPTER I.--THE THREE CHIEF FORCES OF WESTERN CIVILIZATION 3-49