handled without evasion the grossest evils of her time, and the spell
which she exercised by simple force of direct dealing was nothing less
than extraordinary.

It is easy to see why Catherine's plain speaking was not resented. She
rarely begins with rebuke. The note of humility is first struck; she is
always "servant and slave of the servants of Jesus Christ." Thence she
frequently passes into fervent meditation on some special theme: the
exceeding wonder of the Divine Love, the duty of prayer, the nature of
obedience. We are lifted above the world into a region of heavenly light
and sweetness, when suddenly--a blow from the shoulder!--a startling sense
of return to earth. From the contemplation of the beauty of holiness,
Catherine has swiftly turned us to face the opposing sin. "Thou art the
man!" A few trenchant sentences, charged with pain, and the soul which has
been raised to celestial places awakes to see in itself the contradiction
of all that is so lovely. Into the region of darkness Catherine goes with
it. It is not "thou" but "we" who have sinned. She holds that sinful heart
so near her own that the beatings are confounded; her words now and again
express a shuddering personal remorse for sins of which she could have had
no personal knowledge. Her sense of unity with her fellow-men lies deeper
than any theory of brotherhood; she feels herself in sober truth guilty of
the sins of her brothers: her experience illustrates the profound truth
that only purity can know perfect penitence.

Catherine is then saved from any touch of Pharisaism by her remarkable
identification of herself with the person to whom she writes. But to
understand her attitude we must go further. For she never pauses in
reprobation of evil. Full of conviction that the soul needs only to
recognise its sin to hate and escape it for ever, she passes swiftly on to
impassioned appeal. Her words breathe a confidence in men that never fails