The Equinox (Volume I, Number IX)

THE EQUINOX You are meditating upon a mystery of faith; St. Ignatius wishes, in the first place, that you should create a place, dream of it, see it, touch it. If it is hell, he gives you burning rocks to touch, he makes you swim in shadows thick as pitch, he puts liquid sulphur on your tongue, he fills your nostrils with an abominable stench, he shows you frightful tortures, and makes you hear groans superhuman in their agony; he commands your will to create all that by exercises obstinately persevered in. Every one carries this out in his own fashion, but always in the way best suited to impress him. It is not the hashish intoxication which was useful to the knavery of the Old Man of the Mountain; it is a dream without sleep, an hallucination without madness, a reasoned and willed vision, a real creation of intelligence and faith. Thence- forward, when he preaches, the Jesuit can say: ‘What we have seen with our eyes, what we have heard with our ears, and what our hands have handled, that do we declare unto you.” The Jesuit thus trained is in communion with a circle of wills exercised like his own ; consequently each of the fathers is as strong as the Society, and the Society is stronger than the world. CHAPTER II HOW TO PRESERVE AND RENEW YOUTH—THE SECRETS OF CAGLIOSTRO—THE POSSIBILITY OF RESURRECTION— EXAMPLE OF WILLIAM POSTEL, CALLED THE RESURRECTED —STORY OF A WONDER-WORKING WORKMAN, ETC. One knows that a sober, moderately busy, and perfectly regular life usually prolongs existence; but in our opinion, 274