The crucifix at St. Damian's--which is still preserved in the sacristy
of Santa Chiara--has features peculiarly its own. It differs from other
images of the kind: 'In most of the sanctuaries of the twelfth century,
the Crucified One, frightfully lacerated, with bleeding wounds, appears
to seek to inspire only grief and compunction; that of St. Damian, on
the contrary, has an expression of unutterable calm and gentleness;
instead of closing the eyelids in eternal surrender to the weight of
suffering, it looks down in self-forgetfulness, and its pure, clear gaze
says, not "_See how I suffer!_" but "_Come unto Me!_"'

That, at any rate, is what it said to Francis on that memorable day.
With an empty and a hungry heart he kneeled before it. 'O Lord Jesus,'
he cried, 'shed Thy light upon the darkness of my mind!' And then an
extraordinary thing happened. The Saviour to whom he prayed was no
longer an inanimate image; but a living Person! 'An answer seemed to
come from the tender eyes that looked down on him from the Cross,' says
Canon Adderley. 'Jesus heard his cry, and Francis accepted the dear Lord
as his Saviour and Master. A real spiritual union took place between him
and his Divine Lord. He took Him for better for worse, for richer for
poorer, till death and after death, for ever.' 'This vision marks,'
Sabatier says, 'the final triumph of Francis. His union with Christ is
consummated; from this time he can exclaim with the mystics of every
age, "My beloved is mine and I am His." From that day the remembrance of
the Crucified One, the thought of the love which had triumphed in
immolating itself, became the very center of his religious life, the
soul of his soul. For the first time, Francis had been brought into
direct, personal, intimate contact with Jesus Christ.' 'It was,' Canon
Adderley says again, 'no mere intellectual acceptance of a theological
proposition, but an actual self-committal to the Person of Jesus; no
mere sentimental feeling of pity for the sufferings of Christ, or of
comfort in the thought that, through those sufferings, he could secure a
place in a future heaven, but a real, brave assumption of the Cross, an
entering into the fellowship of the Passion of Christ, a determination
to suffer with Him and to spend and be spent in His service.'

Francis never forgot that moment. His whole soul overflowed with the
intensity of his affection for his Saviour. To the end of his days he
could never think of th