matter with me, I cannot suppose it to be a slip of the tongue, as I should have supposed, had the speaker been less of a scholar. This construction, however, instead of obscuring really sets forth the matter with clearer resemblance to the psychic's useful physiological experience, as will be seen by comparing it with the legends I have referred to regarding the finding of the body of Osiris by Isis. Only by comparing this Latin expression with the legends and their application, will the phrase be properly understood.
It is noteworthy, however, that in St. Teresa's case, her confessor after having her write out a detailed account of her experience, ordered her to burn a great part of it. Was it because the objectivity of her experiences did not harmonize very well with the mystical idea of "espousal to Christ"?
Where the earthly partner in these unions was a woman, and a nun at that, pledged to unfaltering obedience to her official superiors, it was probably an easy matter for her confessor to lump all her experiences veridical as well as illusory under one heading, that of subjective. A virgin is usually by reason of her environment as a woman, so ignorant of the physiology of marriage that it is difficult for her as a psychic to distinguish what is real from what is unreal until she has been a Borderland wife for sometime. But for the priest to whom the blessed experience of Borderland wedlock came in all its fullness, a different course of treatment must have been necessary, since being a man, with the opportunities of knowledge open to a man, and to a priestly confessor of sinful men and women, he could not be hoodwinked by his superior into taking for subjective illusions these experiences which were distinctly objective. The records of witchcraft contain accounts of priests who were burned at the stake for a union of thii sort extending over forty or fifty years, with a spirit assumed to be the Devil in the form of a woman.
Pope Gregory is known as Hildebrand, that pope who strove so persistently to purge the priesthood of simony and unchastity and to emancipate the Church from inter
