6. Descriptions of hell (the City of Eternal Hate) and Purgatory, with
which the _Divine Commedia_ may be compared.
Preparation for death.
7. Various and disconnected. References to contemporary persons and
events.
[6]Author of the "Psalter of the Blessed Virgin."
[7]See _Purgatoria_, Canto xxxi. 129.
"My soul was tasting of the food that while
It satisfies us, makes us hunger for it."
[8]See Isaiah lx. 19, 20, as explaining this thought: "The sun shall be
no more thy light by day; neither for brightness shall the moon give
light unto thee: but the Lord shall be unto thee an everlasting light,
and thy God thy glory. Thy sun shall no more go down; neither shall
thy moon withdraw itself: for the Lord shall be thine everlasting
light, and the days of thy mourning shall be ended."
[9]In which the Church, the Body of Christ, is spoken of as existing not
only before His death and resurrection, but before He became
Incarnate.
[10]"Why did I thus pray?" she writes. "Because I find that I am still
just as despicable and unworthy as I was thirty years ago when I began
to write. But the Lord showed me that He had healing roots stored, as
it were, in a little sack, and with them should the sick be refreshed,
and the healthy strengthened, and the dead raised, and the godly
sanctified."
[11]Matilda the Beguine's own words relating to the death of a friend may
better describe her own--
"He laid him down upon the breast of God
In measureless delight,
Enfolded in the tenderness untold,
The sweetness infinite."
The account given by Matilda of Hackeborn is but an evidence of the
unreal state of those who were for ever craving for some fresh
revelations to supplement the Word of God; who unconsciously to
themselves were walking, so far, by sight, and not by faith, and by
the sight, moreover, of a disordered body.
[12]In general no doubt their delusions arose from the fact that the
falsehood presented itself in the form of authorised teaching. They
were not on their guard against those whom they had learnt from their
cradles to reverence--who represented to them the Apostles of Christ.
And these delusions, acting upon over-strained and ill-taught minds
and half-starved bodies, kept up a state of mental disease, in which
clear and reasonable thought was at times obliterated. It was a
spiritual alcohol or opium that was constantly measured out by the
accredited teachers of the Church.