The Parable Of The Pilgrim By Walter Hilton, Can. Reg.

Walter Hilton, Can. Reg. (c. 1340/1345 - 24 March 1396)[1] was an English Augustinian mystic, whose works gained influence in 15th-century England and Wales. He is commemorated by the Church of England and by the Episcopal Church in the United States.
The first book of The Scale of Perfection (the title is editorial, appearing only on half the manuscripts of Book One)[4] is addressed to a woman recently enclosed as an anchoress, offering her appropriate spiritual exercises. Most of its 93 chapters deal with extirpation of the "foul image of sin" in the soul - perversion of the image of the Trinity in the three spiritual powers of Mind, Reason and Will (reflecting the Father, Son and Holy Spirit, after a tradition drawn from St Augustine) - through a series of meditations on the seven deadly sins. The second book, which addresses itself to Hilton's former reader, who he says has further questions, seems from its style and content rather to address a larger, perhaps more sophisticated audience. Its main theme is reformation of the soul, in faith alone and in both faith and feeling. The latter is presented in an extended metaphor as a spiritual journey to Jerusalem, which is "contemplation in perfect love of God".[5] The first book of the Scale was apparently written some time before the second and circulated separately.
The Mixed Life occasionally appears with the Scale in 15th-century manuscripts and was printed by De Worde in 1494 as a third book of the Scale, possibly at the desire of Lady Margaret Beaufort, Countess of Richmond and Derby, mother of King Henry VII. It occurs in only half the surviving copies of that printing, but all later printings of the Scale included it.
Hilton wrote three other Latin letters of spiritual guidance - the Epistola de Leccione, Intencione, Oracione, Meditacione et Allis, the Epistola ad Quemdam Seculo Renunciare Volentem and Firmissime crede - and a scholastic quodlibet defending images in churches, a practice criticised by Lollards. He also wrote commentaries on the Psalm texts Qui Habitat and Bonum Est (Psalms 90.1 and 91.2), and perhaps on the Canticle Benedictus (Luke 1.68).
Hilton's mystical system is, in the main, a simplification of that of Richard of Saint Victor. His spiritual writings were influential in 15th-century England.[5] They were applied extensively shortly after his death in the Speculum spiritualium. The most famous was the Scale of Perfection, which survives in some 62 manuscripts, including 14 of a Latin translation (the Liber de nobilitate anime) made about 1400 by Hilton's contemporary at Cambridge and Ely, the Carmelite friar Thomas Fishlake (or Fyslake).[5] This translation became the first work written originally in English to circulate on the European continent. The Scale and Mixed Life were printed by Wynkyn de Worde in Westminster in 1494 at the request of Lady Margaret, and five more times before the English Reformation of the 1530s.
With the revival of the Roman Catholic Church in England in the 19th century, a modernised version of a 1659 edition was issued by J. B. Dalgairns in 1870. Evelyn Underhill published an edition of the Scale in 1923.
While never canonized by the Catholic Church, Hilton was honoured with a commemoration in the Church of England on 24 March[7] and in the American Episcopal Church on 9 November, along with Richard Rolle and Margery Kempe.