After years of discipleship, and when he had gone through many things that he might draw nearer to the spirit of Christ, there came to St. Francis that wonderful crowning vision of the Saviour crucified, and amidst the joy of the vision there was pain. From that hour to the day of his death, the record tells us, did Francis bear in secret upon his body the marks of the passion. It does not matter how his frail frame came to respond to the thoughts that so dominated his mind: the important thing for us is not the accidental consequence to the body, but the attitude of mind and spirit, the union of will with a Christ suffering for humanity, bearing the sins of the world. He who has come to be made thus, in the humblest way, the comrade of Christ, must be the comrade too of all his fellow-men. Church and individual alike must show in character and life the meaning of this fellowship — fellowship in joy and in sorrow, too, willingness to learn, to give and to serve. Sharing the burdens of rich and poor, feeling the bonds that bind their lives, accepting ourselves responsibility and blame [p.84] for all ignorance and failure and wrongdoing, we may realize that the spirit of Christ is still at work in the world, that closer than our thoughts is the infinite love, and beneath our weakness the infinite strength of the Father's arms. CHAPTER V: SOME OF NATURE'S SACRAMENTS THE life of words is like in some ways to the life of men; the soul changes within them, though the form remains the same. Yet while language is still living it may regain something of its old power beneath the poet's healing fingers, and now and again a master of words will recall for us some dying form of speech. A writer of power is needed, surely to win us back the older and wiser use of the word sacrament as a spiritual symbol, the revelation of the unseen through the visible, the unfolding of the unknown through the known. "The image of the world," wrote Bacon, [22] "is a message of the Divine wisdom and power"; to many a mystic it has been more even than this, and nature has been full of sacraments bringing life from things not seen.