preaching, telling his beads, litanies, orisons aloud, orisons in his
own breast, repeated self-examination, confession and the rest - in
short, an uninterrupted series of diversified and convergent
ceremonies which, by calculated degrees, drive out terrestrial
preoccupations and overcome him with spiritual impressions;
immediately around him, impressions of the same kind followed by the
contagion of example, mutual fervor, common expectation, involuntary
emulation, and that overstrained eagerness which creates its object;
with all the more certainty that the individual himself works on
himself, in silence, five hours a day, according to the prescriptions
of a profound psychology, in order that his bare conception may take
upon itself body and substance. What-ever may be the subject of his
meditations, he repeats it twice the same day, and each time he begins
by "creating the scene," the Nativity or the Passion, the Day of
Judgment or Hell; he converts the remote and undefined story, the dry,
abstract dogma, into a detailed and figured representation; he dwells
on it, he evokes in turn the images furnished by the five senses,
visual, audible, tactile, olfactory, and even gustatory; he groups
them together, and in the evening he animates them afresh in order
that he may find them more intense when he awakes the next morning. He
thus obtains the complete, precise, almost physical spectacle of his
aspirations; he reaches the alibi, that mental transposition, that
reversal of the points of view in which the order of certainties
becomes inverted, in which substantial objects seem to be vain
phantoms and the mystic world a world of substantial reality.[79] -
According to persons and circumstances, the theme for meditation
differs, and the retreat is prolonged for a shorter or longer period.
For laymen, it generally lasts for three days only; for the Brethren
of the Christian Schools it is eight days annually, and when, at the
age of twenty-eight, they take their vows in perpetuity, it lasts