And if we look, not at seemingly childish fantasticalness in certain mystical lives, but at the later state of shattered health and apparently weakened nerve- and will-power which appears so frequently to be the price paid for the definitely ecstatic type of religion, even where it has been spiritually fruitful, our anxiety is readily renewed. Look at the nine, possibly thirteen, last years of Catherine’s, or at the last period of St. Margaret Mary’s life; note the similar cases of SS. Maria Magdalena de Pazzi and Juliana Falconieri. And we have a figure of all but pure suffering and passivity in St. Lidwina of Schiedam (1380-1433), over which M. Huysmans has managed to be so thoroughly morbid. (2) And if such lives strike us as too exceptional to be taken, with whatever deductions, as a case in point, we can find a thoroughly fair instance in the life of Father Isaac Hecker. Here we have a man of extraordinary breadth, solidity, and activity of mind and character, and whose mysticism is of the most sober and harmonious kind. Yet his close companion and most faithful chronicler, Father Walter Elliott, tells us: “From severe colds, acute headaches, and weakness of the digestive organs, Father Hecker was at all times a frequent sufferer. But, towards the end of the year 1871, his headaches became much more painful, his appetite forsook him, and sleeplessness and excitability of the nervous system were added to his other ailments. Remedies of every kind were tried, but without permanent relief. By the summer of 1872 he was wholly incapacitated.” “The physical sufferings of those last sixteen” (out of the sixty-nine) “years of his life were never such as to impair his mental soundness … though his organs of speech were sometimes too slow for his thoughts.” His digestion and nervous system had been impaired by excessive abstinence in early manhood, and by excessive work in later life, “till at last the body struck work altogether. During the sixteen years of his illness every symptom of bodily illness was aggravated by the least attention to community affairs or business matters, and also by interior trials,” although he still managed, by heroic efforts, at times directly to serve his congregation and to write some remarkable papers. Yet this state continued, practically unbroken, up to the end, on December 22, 1888.[58] And although the various proximate causes, indicated by Father Elliott, had no doubt been operative here, there can, in view of the numerous similar cases, be no question that the most fundamental of the reasons of this general condition of health was his strongly mystical type and habit of mind and his corresponding psycho-physical organization.