Willoughby. Mrs. Leade is one of the most conspicuous of their number,—a widow of good family from Norfolk, who forsook the world and retired into her inmost self, holding intercourse with spirits and writing her revelations.
Gower. She, I believe, carried to its practical extreme the Paracelsian doctrine concerning the magical power of faith.
Willoughby. That is her one idea. By union with the divine will, she says, the ancient believers wrought their miracles. Faith has now the same prerogative: the will of the soul, wholly yielded to God, becomes a resistless power, can bind and loose, bless and ban, throughout the universe. Had any considerable number among men a faith so strong, rebellious nature would be subdued by their holy spells, and Paradise restored.
Atherton. Some of the German Romanticists have revived this idea—never, perhaps, wholly dead. Some stir was made for awhile by the theory that the power of miracle was native in man—and haply recoverable.
Willoughby. Such a doctrine is but one among the many retrogressions of the mediæval school.
BOOK THE NINTH
THE SPANISH MYSTICS
CHAPTER I.
It is no flaming lustre, made of light,
No sweet concert nor well-timed harmony,
Ambrosia, for to feast the appetite,