digestive function, and prove one's point by the worship of
Bacchus and Ceres, or by the ecstatic feelings of some other
saints about the Eucharist? Religious language clothes itself in
such poor symbols as our life affords, and the whole organism
gives overtones of comment whenever the mind is strongly stirred
to expression. Language drawn from eating and drinking is
probably as common in religious literature as is language drawn
from the sexual life. We "hunger and thirst" after
righteousness; we "find the Lord a sweet savor;" we "taste and
see that he is good." "Spiritual milk for American babes, drawn
from the breasts of both testaments," is a sub-title of the once
famous New England Primer, and Christian devotional literature
indeed quite floats in milk, thought of from the point of view,
not of the mother, but of the greedy babe.

Saint Francois de Sales, for instance, thus describes the "orison
of quietude": "In this state the soul is like a little child
still at the breast, whose mother to caress him whilst he is
still in her arms makes her milk distill into his mouth without
his even moving his lips. So it is here. . . . Our Lord desires
that our will should be satisfied with sucking the milk which His
Majesty pours into our mouth, and that we should relish the
sweetness without even knowing that it cometh from the Lord."
And again: "Consider the little infants, united and joined to
the breasts of their nursing mothers you will see that from time
to time they press themselves closer by little starts to which
the pleasure of sucking prompts them. Even so, during its
orison, the heart united to its God oftentimes makes attempts at
closer union by movements during which it presses closer upon the
divine sweetness." Chemin de la Perfection, ch. xxxi.; Amour de