Not many of us are favoured with visions, usually through our own fault: for the best of all visions is the right appreciation of the inner significance of all these everyday things we have looked at for so long with unseeing eyes. That, we are sure, is the real character of the visions of the mystics. And these are visions which do not come suddenly and as suddenly fade away, leaving nothing but a memory behind them; they remain for ever.

It was a vision of this kind that came to a certain brother as he stood one night chanting matins in the choir along with the others. Humanly speaking, he did not deserve to have a vision, for he was not in the dispositions which are piously supposed to lead to such favours. His lips were mumbling the psalms, but his mind was far away, and he looked to be bored. To speak the truth, he was tired, and longed for nothing so much as the end, so that he might go to bed. And if you could have seen into his mind and heart, you would have found that the attitude of his soul was no better than that of his body. He was in a mood of dejection and disappointment, for he was young in religious life, and religious life had not come up to his expectations. All his young life he had been a romantic dreamer, for ever lending himself to an imaginative exaltation of the past.