It was here that he first distinguished two kinds of visions, infernal and celestial.

Here also he grew familiar with the uses of concrete imagination;, and understood how the faculty of sensuous realization might be made a powerful engine for presenting the past of sacred history or the dogmas of orthodox theology under shapes of fancy to the mind.

Finally, in all the experiences of Manresa, he tried the temper of his own character, which was really not that of a poet or a mystic, but of a sagacious man of action, preparing a system calculated to subjugate the intelligence and will of millions.

Tested by self-imposed sufferings and by diseased hallucinations, his sound sense, the sense of one destined to control men, gathered energy, and grew in, solid strength: yet enough remained of his fanaticism to operate as a motive force in the scheme which he afterwards developed; enough survived from the ascetic phase he had surmounted, to make him comprehend that some such agony as he had suffered should form the vestibule to a devoted life.

We may compare the throes of Ignatius at Manresa with the contemporary struggles of Luther at Wittenberg and in the Wartzburg.