His mystic ceremonial became a guide to religious practice, and though with this there came in much meaningless and even bewildering formalism, yet the example of his life and character was a lasting inspiration to saintliness.
His visages have an air of rapt suavity, devotional fervency and beaming esoteric consciousness, which is intensely attractive to some minds and realizes beyond rivalry a particular ideal - that of ecclesiastical saintliness and detachment from secular fret and turmoil.
To the saintliness of the cloister he added the wisdom of the man of the world; he was constant in misfortune, not elated by prosperity, never "carrying things to the sweating-point'," but preserving, in a time of universal corruption, unreality and self-indulgence, a nature sweet, pure, self-denying, unaffected.