Led by her, I saw the Saviour as love incarnate; and that the love which He brought into the world was still and ever a living thing working after His will, I strove to confess with my thinking mind.  But I beheld even the Archbishops and Bishops go forth to battle, and shed the blood of their fellow men with vengeful rage; I saw Pope excommunicate Pope—­for the great Schism only came to an end while I was yet at school; peaceful cities in their sore need bound themselves by treaties, under our eyes, for defence against Christian knights and lords.  The robber bands of the great nobles plundered merchants on the Emperor’s highway, though they were of the same creed, while the citizens strove to seize the strongholds of the knights.  We heard of many more letters of defiance than of peacemaking and friendship.  Even the burgesses of our good Christian town—­could not the love taught by the Redeemer prevail even among them?  And as with the great so with the simple; for was it love alone that reigned among us maidens in a Christian school?  Nay, verily; for never shall I forget how that Ursula Tetzel, and in fellowship with her a good half of the others, pursued my sweet, sage Ann, the most diligent and best of us all, to drive her out of our midst; but in vain, thanks to Sister Margaret’s upright justice.  Nay, the shrewish plotters were fain at last to see the scrivener’s daughter uplifted to be our head, and this compelled them to bend their pride before her.

All this and much more I would say to the good Sister; nay, and I made so bold as to ask her whether Christ’s behest that we should love our enemy were not too high for attainment by the spirit of man.  This made her grave and thoughtful; yet she found no lack of comforting words, and said that the Lord had only showed the way and the end.  That men had turned sadly from both; but that many a stream wandered through divers windings from the path to its goal, the sea, before it reached it; and that mankind was wondrous like the stream, for, albeit they even now rend each other in bloody fights, the day will come when foe shall offer to foe the palm of peace, and when there shall be but one fold on earth and one Shepherd.

But my anxious questioning, albeit I was but a child, had without doubt troubled her pure and truthful spirit.  It was in Passion week, of the fifth year of my school-life—­and ever through those years she had become more bent and her voice had sunk lower, so that many a time we found it hard to hear her—­that it fell that she could no longer quit her cell; and she sent me a bidding to go to her bedside, and with me only two of us all:  to wit my Ann, and Elsa Ebner, a right good child and a diligent bee in her work.