energy and unresting industry.  Houses of “discalced” Carmelites sprang up all over Spain as the result of his labours.  These monks and nuns slept upon bare boards, fasted eight months in the year, never ate meat, and wore the same serge dress in winter and summer.  In some of these new foundations the Brethren even vied with each other in adding voluntary austerities to this severe rule.  It was all part of the campaign against Protestantism.  The worldliness and luxury of the Renaissance period were to be atoned for by a return to the purity and devotion of earlier centuries.  The older Catholic ideal—­the mediaeval type of Christianity—­was to be restored in all its completeness in the seventeenth century.  This essentially militant character of the movement among the Carmelites must not be lost sight of:  the two great Spanish mystics were before all things champions of the counter-Reformation.

The two chief works of St. Juan are The Ascent of Mount Carmel, and The Obscure Night of the Soul.  Both are treatises on quietistic Mysticism of a peculiar type.  At the beginning of La Subida de Monte Carmelo he says, “The journey of the soul to the Divine union is called night for three reasons:  the point of departure is privation of all desire, and complete detachment from the world; the road is by faith, which is like night to the intellect; the goal, which is God, is incomprehensible while we are in this life.”

The soul in its ascent passes from one realm of darkness to another.  First there is the “night of sense,” in which the things of earth become dark to her.  This must needs be traversed, for “the creatures are only the crumbs that fall from God’s table, and none but dogs will turn to pick them up.”  “One desire only doth God allow—­that of obeying Him, and carrying the Cross.”  All other desires weaken, torment, blind, and pollute the soul.  Until we are completely detached from all such, we cannot love God.  “When thou dwellest upon anything, thou hast ceased to cast thyself upon the All.”  “If thou wilt keep anything with the All, thou hast not thy treasure simply in God.”  “Empty thy spirit of all created things, and thou wilt walk in the Divine light, for God resembles no created thing.”  Such is the method of traversing the “night of sense.”  Even at this early stage the forms and symbols of eternity, which others have found in the visible works of God, are discarded as useless.  “God has no resemblance to any creature.”  The dualism or acosmism of mediaeval thought has seldom found a harsher expression.

In the night of sense, the understanding and reason are not blind; but in the second night, the night of faith, “all is darkness.”  “Faith is midnight”; it is the deepest darkness that we have to pass; for in the “third night, the night of memory and will,” the dawn is at hand.  “Faith” he defines as “the assent of the soul to what we have heard”—­as a blind man would receive a statement about the colour