The psychological soundness of Loyola's method is found in his discovery that the best way to win a man to an ideal is to kindle his imagination.

His own thought was imaginative to the verge of abnormality and the means which he took to awaken and artificially to stimulate this faculty in his followers were drastic in the extreme.
The purpose of the _Exercises_ is stated in the axiom that "Man was created to praise, reverence and serve God our Lord and thereby to save his soul." To fit a man for this work the spiritual exercises were divided into four periods called weeks, though each period might be shortened or lengthened at the discretion of the director.

The first week was devoted to the consideration of sin; the second to that of Christ's life as far as Palm Sunday; the third to his passion; and the fourth to his resurrection and ascension.

Knowing the tremendous power of the stimulant to be administered Ignatius inserted wise counsels of moderation in the application of it.

But, subject only to the condition that the novice was not to be plied beyond what he could bear, he was directed in the first week of {402} solitary meditation to try to see the length, breadth and depth of hell, to hear the lamentations and blasphemies of the damned, to smell the smoke and brimstone, to taste the bitterness of tears and of the worm of conscience and to feel the burnings of the unquenchable fire.