"She changed the stones and crosses (with which when going to prayer in her childhood, and as yet ignorant of whips, she was loaded by her maid Marianne, who was almost the only person conscious of her mortifications) into iron chains, which she prepared as scourges, and after the example of St. Dominic, every night she offered herself a bloody victim to God to avert his just anger, even to the copious effusion of streams of blood, either for the sorrows of the holy church, or for the necessities of the endangered kingdom of the city of Lima, or for compensating the wrongs of sinners, or for making an expiation for the souls of the dead, or for obtaining divine aid for those who were in their last agonies; the servant being sometimes horror-struck at the dreadful blows of the chains. And when the use of these were forbidden her she privately encircled her waist with one of them, bound thrice around her, so that it never was apparent that she wore it except when she was under the torture of sciatica, when the chain was loosened by a miracle. Its links after the Virgin's death were found to emit a wondrous and indescribable sweet odor. Lest any part of her innocent body should be free from suffering, she tortured her arms and limbs with penal chains and stuffed her breasts and sides with handfuls of nettles and small briars. She afterward increased the sharpness of the hair cloth that reached from her neck beneath her knees by needles mixed up with it, which she used for many years, until she was ordered to put it off on account of the frequent vomiting of

blood. Her feet only were free from the irritation of these blessed garments; but by hitting them with stones and burning them at an oven she did not allow them to escape. She fixed upon her head a tin crown, with sharp nails in it, so that when she put it on it drew blood, and as she grew older the crown was replaced by one with ninety-nine lacerating points. She desired the hardness of her bed to be such that it should rather drive away than induce sleep. was either an unpolished trunk, or stones concealed for this purpose, which bed she afterward so filled with sharp pieces of tiles and triangular fragments of broken jugs that the sharp points of each should be turned to her body. Nor did she try to sleep until she had embittered her mouth with a draught of gall.

Her pillow

"Near the time of her death Rosa throughout Lent alternately sang the canticles and praises of God every day for whole hours with a very melodious bird, in so orderly a manner that when the bird sang the virgin was silent, and when the virgin sang, the bird, who was most attentive, ceased to sing. She invited, moreover, the inanimate plants to praise and pray to God, pronouncing the verse, Benedicite universa Germinantia in terra Domino, and so visibly persuaded them that the tops of the trees touched the earth as if adoring their Creator with a solemn veneration." All the above, and more, affords an extraordinary illustration of the exalted piety from which we have deteriorated.

The fact, to the contrary, is that you may go through

the Roman Breviary and Mabillon's Acta Sanctorum without finding a single act of rational piety in any of them. It is no wonder that the people brought up on this sort of blasphemy against a reasonable God should act, reason, and appear different from other people, and so traduce their rational contemporaries as to charge them with moral deterioration.

Just as there is nothing that sanctifies life like friendship, so there is nothing that embitters it like strife. Nevertheless, we protest against the supercilious, self-satisfied arrogance of the man, or the men, who maintains or asserts the moral retrogression of his own period and, as a necessary corollary, that the purposes of God have failed.

CHAPTER XIX

In the ninth century the wives of priests were openly acknowledged and were known as priestesses, and it became so much of a scandal that their priestly husbands were even charged with marrying off their daughters with churches as dowries. "The Bishop of Dole made free with the property of the church to set up his daughters in wedded splendor." The priest's wife in that same century, the ninth, took her place near her husband, and not far from the altar, and the wife of the bishop claimed precedency over a count

ess.

Gregory VII, on his accession to the papal throne, found priests in every direction either with wives or mistresses, surrounded with children. The synod at Rome, 1074 A. D., was assembled by him for the enactment of decrees ordering an immediate separation of priests from women, whether as wives or concubines. These laws or restrictions were recommended with the most ferocious threatenings.

The Archbishop of Mentz held a synod at Erfurt to persuade his priests to give up their wives. His effort filled them with anger, and they threatened to kill or to depose him.

Let any one doubting the moral superiority of the present as compared with the past read Michelet on

"Auricular Confessions," p. 136, as an illustration of the vileness of the people before the Reformation, or let him read the specimens of moral filthiness recorded in Bailly, Peter Dens, and Saint Alphonsus Liquori in relation to the iniquities of the faithful, who died in the odor of sanctity, and believed in the seven sacraments, and were untouched by modern heresy. Many of them are too horrible to transcribe and shall not appear in this book. Yet they are the things recorded in the religious text-books of the past as being common among the people to such an extent that priests received special instruction in regard to the manner in which such outpourings of personal filthiness should be received in the confessional. The people who charge the present with being worse than the past and the world with moral retrogression from older and better customs, do not know, or pretend that they do not know, what the past was.