Her own account of this vital change is as follows:  “I told this good father that I did not know what he had done to me; that my heart was totally changed; that God was there, and I had no more difficulty in finding Him; for from that moment was given me an experience of His presence in my soul; not by mere thought or intellectual application, but as a thing which one really possesses in a very sweet manner.  I experienced these words of the spouse in the Canticles:  ’Thy name is as ointment poured forth:  therefore do the virgins love thee.’  For I felt in my soul an unction which like a healing balm cured in a moment all my wounds, and which even spread itself so powerfully over my senses that I could scarcely open my mouth or my eyes.  That night I could not sleep at all, because Thy love, O my God, was for me not only as a delicious oil, but also as a devouring fire, which kindled in my soul such a flame as threatened to consume all in an instant.  I was all at once so changed as not to be recognisable either to myself or to others.  I found neither the blemishes nor the dislikes (which had troubled me):  all appeared to me consumed like a straw in a great fire.” [1]

[Footnote 1:  Ibid., ch. viii., 8.]

These extracts from her autobiography are important as giving a key to her subsequent life.  We see here the intensity of her affections and emotions, the excitability of her temperament, the tendency to wander into regions of spiritual imagination, the liking for strong dramatic expression, which, though not in themselves blamable, yet gave to the outside world, and even to those about her who were open to adverse prepossessions, false impressions as to the depth and reality of her religion.  They, close at hand, could not make the allowance which we can easily make for the extravagances of a soul which had just emerged from the prison gloom of depression and distrust into this realisation of the Divine love and favour.  When her enthusiastic spirit led her to subject herself to the severest penances, she joyed in their infliction and could not make them severe enough.  And here at once comes out prominently a primary error of judgment in this good woman at the very outset of her Christian life.  She gives us details of a specially disgusting penance which she inflicted on herself.  In this, as in the rest of her self-imposed tortures and degradations, the impulse manifestly came not from above, but from the mistaken imaginings of an over-wrought mind encased in a frail and delicate frame; and these morbid fancies were based on her intense passion for self-abasement.  We must remember that at this critical time, when she most needed counsel, she had really no one to guide her—­no one, that is, who possessed spiritual wisdom and common sense.