So in her quiet, silent heart she nursed this beautiful hope of finding in Rome the earthly image of her Saviour’s home above, of finding in the head of the Church the real image of her Redeemer,—­the friend to whom the poorest and lowliest may pour out their souls with as much freedom as the highest and noblest.  The spiritual directors who had formed the mind of Agnes in her early days had been persons in the same manner taught to move in an ideal world of faith.  The Mother Theresa had never seen the realities of life, and supposed the Church on earth to be all that the fondest visions of human longing could paint it.  The hard, energetic, prose experience of old Jocunda, and the downright way with which she sometimes spoke of things as a trooper’s wife must have seen them, were repressed and hushed, down, as the imperfect faith of a half-reclaimed worldling,—­they could not be allowed to awaken her from the sweetness of so blissful a dream.  In like manner, when Lorenzo Sforza became Father Francesco, he strove with earnest prayer to bury his gift of individual reason in the same grave with his family name and worldly experience.  As to all that transpired in the real world, he wrapped himself in a mantle of imperturbable silence; the intrigues of popes and cardinals, once well known to him, sank away as a forbidden dream; and by some metaphysical process of imaginative devotion he enthroned God in the place of the dominant powers, and taught himself to receive all that came from them in uninquiring submission, as proceeding from unerring wisdom.  Though he had begun his spiritual life under the impulse of Savonarola, yet so perfect had been his isolation from all tidings of what transpired in the external world that the conflict which was going on between that distinguished man and the Papal hierarchy never reached his ear.  He sought and aimed as much as possible to make his soul like the soul of one dead, which adores and worships in ideal space, and forgets forever the scenes and relations of earth; and he had so long contemplated Rome under the celestial aspects of his faith, that, though the shock of his first confession there had been painful, still it was insufficient to shake his faith.  It had been God’s will, he thought, that where he looked for aid he should meet only confusion, and he bowed to the inscrutable will, and blindly adored the mysterious revelation.  If such could be the submission and the faith of a strong and experienced man, who can wonder at the enthusiastic illusions of an innocent, trustful child?

Agnes and her grandmother entered the city of Rome just as the twilight had faded into night; and though Agnes, full of faith and enthusiasm, was longing to begin immediately the ecstatic vision of shrines and holy places, old Elsie commanded her not to think of anything further that night.  They proceeded, therefore, with several other pilgrims who had entered the city, to a church specially set apart for their