Of these experiences it is difficult to write judiciously in this
practical age.

Master Richard Raynal appears to have been a very curious young man, of
great personal beauty, extreme simplicity, and a certain magnetic
attractiveness. He believed himself, further, to be in direct and
constant communication with supernatural things, and would be set down
now as a religious fanatic, deeply tinged with superstition. His parson,
too, in these days, would be thought little better, but at the time in
which they lived both would probably be regarded with considerable
veneration. We hear, in fact, that a chapel was finally erected over
Master Raynal's body, and that pilgrimages were made there; and
probably, if the rest of the work had been preserved to us, we should
have found a record of miracles wrought at his shrine. All traces,
however, of that shrine have now disappeared--most likely under the
stern action of Henry VIII.--and Richard's name is unknown to
hagiology, in spite of his parson's confidence as regarded his future
beatification.

It is, however, interesting to notice that in Master Raynal's
religion, as in Richard Rolle's, hermit of Hampole, there appears to
have been some of that inchoate Quietism which was apt to tinge the
faith of a few of the English solitaries. He was accustomed to attend
mass devoutly and to receive the sacraments, and on his death-bed was
speeded into the next world, at his own desire, by all the observances
prescribed by the Catholic Church. His attitude, too, towards the
priesthood, is somewhat uncharacteristic of his fellows, who were apt
to boast with apparent complacency that they were neither "monk, friar,
nor clerk." In other matters he is a good type of that strange race of