was lofty and solemn. She
had very little sympathy for any weakness in others, but she was always
ready to dispense the mercy of Heaven, vicariously, so to say, and with
a certain royally suppressed surprise that Heaven should be merciful.
On the whole, considering the circumstances, she admitted that Maria
Addolorata had accepted the veil with sufficient outward grace, though
without any vocation, and she took it for granted that with such
opportunities the girl must slowly develop into an abbess not unlike her
predecessors. She prayed regularly, of course, and with especial
intention, for her niece, as for the welfare of the order, and assumed
as an unquestionable result that her prayers were answered with perfect
regularity, since her own conscience did not reproach her with
negligence of her young relative's spiritual education.

To the abbess, religion, the order and its duties, presented themselves
as a vast machine controlled for the glory of God by the Pope. She and
her nuns were parts of the great engine which must work with perfect
regularity in order that God might be glorified. Her mind was naturally
religious, but was at the same time essentially of the material order.
There is a material imagination, and there is a spiritual imagination.
There are very good and devout men and women who take the world, present
and to come, quite literally, as a mere fulfilment of their own
limitations; who look upon what they know as being all that need be
known, and upon what they believe of God and Heaven as the mechanical
consequence of what they know rather than as the cause and goal,
respectively, of existence and action; to whom the letter of the law is
the arbitrary expression of a despotic power, which, somehow, must be
looked upon as merciful; who answer all questions concerning God's logic
with the tremendous assertion of God's will; whose God is a magnified
man, and whose devil is a malignant animal, second only to God in
understanding, while extreme from God in disposition. There are good men
and women who, to use a natural but not flippant simile, take it for
granted that the soul is cast into the troubled waters of life without
the power to swim, or even the possibility of learning to float,
dependent upon the bare chance that some one may throw it the life-buoy
of ritual religion as its only conceivable means of salvation. And the
opponents of each particular form of faith invariably take just such
good men a