involuntary. Be this as it may, our concern at present is simply with
control exercised over the will and the understanding.

With regard to the will, it is a commonplace of mystical theology that
God, who gave it its natural and essential bent towards the good of
reason, i.e., towards righteousness and the Divine will; who created
it not merely as an irresistible tendency towards the happiness and
self-realization of the rational subject, but as a resistible tendency
towards its _true_, happiness and _true_ self-realization--that this
same God can directly modify the will without the natural mediation of
some suggested thought. We ourselves, by the laborious cultivation of
virtue, gradually modify the response of our will to certain
suggestions, making it more sensitive to right impulses, more obtuse to
evil impulses. According to mystic theology, it is the prerogative of
God to dispense with this natural method of education, and, without
violating that liberty of choice (which no inclination can prejudice),
to incline the rational appetite this way or that; not only in reference
to some suggested object, but also without reference to any distinct
object whatsoever, so that the soul should be abruptly filled with joy
or sadness, with fear or hope, with desire or aversion, and yet be at a
loss to determine the object of these spiritual passions. St. Ignatius
Loyola, in his "Rules for Discerning Spirits," borrowed no doubt from
the current mystical theology of his day, makes this absence of any
suggested object a criterion of "consolation" coming from God alone--a
criterion always difficult to apply owing to the lightning subtlety of
thoughts that flash across the soul and are forgotten even while their
emotional reverberation yet remains. Where there was a preceding thought
to account for the emotion, he held that the "consolation" might be the
work of spirits (good or evil) who could not influence the will
directly, but only indirectly through the mind; or else it might be the