ithout, bearing all its faculties
away on its resistless tide.

Brought up from infancy to feel herself in a constant circle of
invisible spiritual agencies, Agnes received this wave of intense
feeling as an impulse inspired and breathed into her by some celestial
spirit, that thus she should be made an interceding medium for a soul in
some unknown strait or peril. For her faith taught her to believe in an
infinite struggle of intercession in which all the Church Visible and
Invisible were together engaged, and which bound them in living bonds of
sympathy to an interceding Redeemer, so that there was no want or woe
of human life that had not somewhere its sympathetic heart, and its
never-ceasing prayer before the throne of Eternal Love. Whatever may be
thought of the actual truth of this belief, it certainly was far more
consoling than that intense individualism of modern philosophy which
places every soul alone in its life-battle,--scarce even giving it a God
to lean upon.

CHAPTER XI.

THE CONFESSIONAL.

The reader, if a person of any common knowledge of human nature,
will easily see the direction in which a young, inexperienced, and
impressible girl would naturally be tending under all the influences
which we perceive to have come upon her.

But in the religious faith which Agnes professed there was a modifying
force, whose power both for good and evil can scarcely be estimated.

The simple Apostolic direction, "Confess your faults one to another,"
and the very natural need of personal pastoral guidance and assistance
to a soul in its heavenward journey, had in common with many other
religious ideas been forced by the volcanic fervor of the Italian nature
into a certain exaggerated proposition. Instead of brotherly confession
one to another, or the pastoral sympathy of a fatherly elder, the
religious mind of the day was instructed in an awful mysterious
sacrament of confession, which gave to some human being a divine right
to unlock the most secret chambers of the soul, to scrutinize and direct
its most veiled and intimate thoughts, and, standing in God's stead, to
direct the current of its most sensitive and most mysterious emotions.

Every young aspirant for perfection in the religious life had to
commence by an unreserved surrender of the whole being in blind faith at
the feet of some such spiritual director, all whose questions must
be answered, and all whose injunctions obeyed, as from God himself.