12 ROYAL SOCIETY OF CANADA 



are full of plain speaking against ugly sins; yet none are more wonder- 

 fully persuasive. She did in very truth become the spiritual " dearest 

 sister " of each correspondent, and the " Slave of the servants of Jesus 

 Crucified ;" and no one better understood how many different ways of 

 holiness could lead to the one Heaven, adapted to every variety of char- 

 acter: "in my Father's house are many mansions" is her favourite 

 refrain. The world had need of her in that lax age of sundering strife, 

 which is only too well described in tlie chronicle of Neri di Donate for 



1373 : " . . the Brothers of St. x^ustin killed their Provincial at 



Sant' Antonio, and in Siena was much fighting. At Assisi, the Brothers 

 Minor fought, and killed fourteen with the knife. The Brothers of the 

 Rose fought and drove six away. ... So all Eeligious everywhere 

 seemed to have strife and dissension among themselves. And every 

 Eeligious, of whatever rule, was oppressed and insulted by the world. . . . 

 It seems there are divisions over all the world. In Siena loyalty was 

 not observed; gentlemen did not show it among themselves nor outside; 

 nor did the Kine among themselves, nor with people outside, nor did the 

 Twelve. The people did not agree with their leader, nor exactly with 

 any one else." 



The youngest of the twenty-five children of a common dyer of 

 Siena, St. Catherine was only sixteen when she had already lived down 

 the opposition excited by her precocious ecstasies, her visions, her vows 

 and her ascetic practices. Devoted followers began to gather round her; 

 and she threw herself into the work of rescuing errant souls from this 

 mad flux of evil with all the effectiveness of the practical mystic. It was 

 characteristic of her that when she started on a pilgrimage, at the age of 

 eight, she took bread and water with her, lest the angels might forget her 

 on the way. Her success in personal persuasion was the wond^i' of her 

 own age, as it has been of all suoceeding. The consummatioa of her 

 visions came on the last day of the carnival of 1367, when «ho was 

 divinely espoused to her Redeemer. Henceforth she knew hers':U' ^'boughr 

 with a price." She had previously become a Dominican tertia.-y. one of 

 those devout women who live at home under religious rule. She never 

 sought the cloisters; but, on the contrary, became more active in domestic 

 and social life as time went on. She quickly got into touch with people 

 of all classes, all occupations, all opinions. There never was a wider 

 correspondence: with two Popes, several cardinals and many humbler 

 "religious " of both sexes; with the King of France and the concupiscent 

 Giovanna, Queen of Naples; with the reclaimed Brother William of 

 England, and with that redoubtable free-lance. Sir John Hawkwood; 

 with the members of her own humble family, and with otliers as various 

 as they were many. Yet it was only in 1377, when she was thirty, that 



