Lady
Burton was one of these; she had her feet firm set upon the everlasting
Rock. The teaching of her Church was to her divinest truth. The
supernatural was real, the spiritual actual. The conflict between the
powers of light and the powers of darkness, between good angels and evil
angels, between benign influences and malefic forces, was no figure of
speech with her, but a reality. In these last years of her life more
especially the earthly veil seemed to have fallen over her eyes. She
seemed to have grasped something of the vision of the servant of Elisha,
for whom the prophet prayed: "_Lord, I pray Thee, open his eyes, that he
may see. And the Lord opened the eyes of the young man; and he saw: and,
behold, the mountain was full of horses and chariots of fire round about
Elisha_."
Because of all this, because her religion was such an actuality to her,
is, I think, due half the misunderstandings which have arisen with regard
to Lady Burton's attitude towards so-called "spiritualism." She always
held that Catholicism was the highest form of spiritualism--using the
word in its highest meaning--and from this attitude she never wavered.
She had lived much in the East, and had come much into contact with
oriental occult influences, but what she saw only served to convince
her more of the truths of her religion. Lady Burton was a Christian
mystic, not in the vulgar sense of the word, but only in the sense that
many devout and religious women have been Christian mystics too.
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