Thenceforward was to be no soul-privacy, no retirement, nothing too
sacred to be expressed, too delicate to be handled and analyzed. In
reading the lives of those ethereally made and moulded women who
have come down to our day canonized as saints in the Roman Catholic
communion, one too frequently gets the impression of most regal natures,
gifted with all the most divine elements of humanity, but subjected to
a constant unnatural pressure from the ceaseless scrutiny and ungenial
pertinacity of some inferior and uncomprehending person invested with
the authority of a Spiritual Director.

That there are advantages attending this species of intimate direction,
when wisely and skilfully managed, cannot be doubted. Grovelling and
imperfect natures have often thus been lifted up and carried in the arms
of superior wisdom and purity. The confession administered by a Fenelon
or a Francis de Sales was doubtless a beautiful and most invigorating
ordinance; but the difficulty in its actual working is the rarity of
such superior natures,--the fact, that the most ignorant and most
incapable may be invested with precisely the same authority as the most
intelligent and skilful.

He to whom the faith of Agnes obliged her to lay open her whole soul,
who had a right with probing-knife and lancet to dissect out all the
finest nerves and fibres of her womanly nature, was a man who had been
through all the wild and desolating experiences incident to a dissipated
and irregular life in those turbulent days.

It is true, that he was now with most stringent and earnest solemnity
striving to bring every thought and passion into captivity to the spirit
of his sacred vows; but still, when a man has once lost that unconscious
soul-purity which exists in a mind unscathed by the fires of passion, no
after-tears can weep it back again. No penance, no prayer, no anguish
of remorse can give back the simplicity of a soul that has never been
stained.

If Padre Francesco had not failed to make those inquiries into the
character of Agnes's mysterious lover which he assumed to be necessary
as a matter of pastoral faithfulness.

It was not difficult for one possessing the secrets of the confessional
to learn the real character of any person in the neighborhood, and it
was with a kind of bitter satisfaction which rather surprised himself
that the father learned enough ill of the cavalier to justify his using
every possible measure to prevent his forming a