Meanwhile Agnes, kneeling before the shrine, was going through, with great feeling and tenderness, the various manuals and movements of nightly devotion which her own religious fervour and the zeal of her spiritual advisers had enjoined upon her. Christianity, when it entered Italy, came among a people every act of whose life was coloured and consecrated by symbolic and ritual acts of heathenism. The only possible way to uproot this was in supplanting it by Christian ritual and symbolism equally minute and pervading. Besides, in those ages when the Christian preacher was utterly destitute of all such help as the press now gives in keeping under the eye of converts the great inspiring truths of religion, it was one of the first offices of every saint whose preaching stirred the heart of the people, to devise symbolic forms, signs, and observances, by which the mobile and fluctuating heart of the multitude might crystallize into habits of devout remembrance. The rosary, the crucifix, the shrine, the banner, the processions, were catechisms and tracts invented for those who could not read, wherein the substance of pages was condensed and gave itself to the eye and the touch. Let us not, from the height of our day, with the better appliances which a universal press gives us, sneer at the homely rounds of the ladder by which the first multitudes of the Lord’s flock climbed heavenward. If there seemed somewhat mechanical in the number of times which Agnes repeated the “Hail, Mary!”—in the prescribed number of times she rose, or bowed, or crossed herself, or laid her forehead in low humility on the flags of the pavement, it was redeemed by the earnest fervour which inspired each action. However foreign to the habits of a Northern mind or education such a mode of prayer may be, these forms to her were all helpful and significant; her soul was borne by them Godward, and often, as she prayed, it seemed to her that she could feel the dissolving of all earthy things, and the pressing nearer and nearer of the great cloud of witnesses who ever surround the humblest member of Christ’s mystical body. “Sweet loving hearts around her beat, Sweet helping hands are stirred, And palpitates the veil between With breathings almost heard.”