CHAPTER XXIII.

Of interior sufferings.

AMONG his various sufferings, there were three interior ones which caused him great torment. One of these was impious imaginations against the faith. Thus, there would come into his mind the thought:—How was it possible for God to become man, with many other thoughts of that kind. The more he fought against them, the more perplexed he became. God suffered him to remain under these temptations about nine years, during which he ceased not with wailing heart and weeping eyes to cry to God and all the Saints for help. At last, when God deemed that the time was come, He set him entirely free from them, and bestowed upon him great steadfastness and clearness of faith.

The second interior suffering was an inordinate sadness. He had such a continual heaviness of spirit, that it was as if a mountain lay upon his heart. A partial cause of this was, that his turning away from creatures to God had been carried out with such excessive speed and severity, that his bodily frame had suffered 98greatly from it. This trial lasted for eight years.

The third interior suffering was a temptation which assailed him, that it would never be well with his soul hereafter, but that he must be damned eternally, no matter how rightly he should act, or how many spiritual exercises he should practise; for all this would be of no avail to place him among the saved, and it all seemed to him lost labour from the beginning. His mind was saddened with this thought day and night; and when he had to go into choir, or to do any other good work, the temptation presented itself:—What does it profit thee to serve God? Then he would say to himself, very mournfully:—Surely there is nothing but a curse for thee. Never will it be well with thee. Give it all up, then, betimes. Thou art lost, do what thou wilt. Then he would think within himself:—Alas, utterly wretched that I am, whither shall I betake myself? If I quit the Order, hell will be my lot; and if I remain in it, nothing but misery awaits me. Alas, Lord God! was there ever a man worse off than I am? Sometimes he would stand deep sunk into himself, and groan many times heavily, while the tears ran down his cheeks. Then he 99would beat his breast and say:—Alas, O God! am I then never to be saved? Oh! what a mournful thing is this! Must I be miserable here and hereafter? Woe is me, that I ever came forth from my mother’s womb.

This temptation fell upon him through an inordinate fear. It had been told him that his admission into the Order had been connected with the bestowal of temporal goods, and from this comes the sin called simony, which consists in the purchase of something spiritual with something temporal. What he heard sunk deep into his heart, until at length he was quite overpowered by the anguish that it caused him.

After this terrible suffering; had lasted about ten years, all which time he never looked upon himself in any other light than as one damned, he went to the holy Master Eckart, and made known to him his suffering. The holy man delivered him from it, and thus set him free from the hell in which he had so long dwelt.