nsports of contemplation he at
once asks himself how he may repay to Jesus love for love, in what
action he shall employ this life which he has just offered to him. He
had not long to seek. We have seen that the chapel where his spiritual
espousals had just been celebrated was threatened with ruin. He believed
that to repair it was the work assigned to him.

From that day the remembrance of the Crucified One, the thought of the
love which had triumphed in immolating itself, became the very centre of
his religious life and as it were the soul of his soul. For the first
time, no doubt, Francis had been brought into direct, personal, intimate
contact with Jesus Christ; from belief he had passed to faith, to that
living faith which a distinguished thinker has so well defined: "To
believe is to look; it is a serious, attentive, and prolonged look; a
look more simple than that of observation, a look which looks, and
nothing more; artless, infantine, it has all the soul in it, it is a
look of the soul and not the mind, a look which does not seek to analyze
its object, but which receives it as a whole into the soul through the
eyes." In these words Vinet unconsciously has marvellously characterized
the religious temperament of St. Francis.

This look of love cast upon the crucifix, this mysterious colloquy with
the compassionate victim, was never more to cease. At St. Damian, St.
Francis's piety took on its outward appearance and its originality. From
this time his soul bears the stigmata, and as his biographers have said
in words untranslatable, _Ab illa hora vulneratum et liquefactum est
cor ejus ed memoriam Dominicae passionis._[6]

From that time his way was plain before him. Coming out from the
sanctuary, he gave the priest all the money he had about him to keep a
lamp always burning, and with ravished heart he returned to Assisi. He
had decided to quit his father's house and undertake the restoration of
the chapel, after having broken the last ties that bound him to the
past. A horse and a few pieces of gayly colored stuffs were all that he
possessed. Arrived at home he made a packet of the stuffs, and mounting
his horse he set out for Foligno. This city was then as now the most
important commercial town of all the region. Its fairs attracted the
whole population of Umbria and the Sabines. Bernardone had often taken
his son there,[7] and Francis speedily succeeded in selling all he had
brought. He even parted with his h