mystery
as a secret and unexplained anguish; saints wrestled with God and
wept over it; but still the awful fact remained, spite of Church and
sacrament, that the gospel was in effect, to the majority of the human
race, not the glad tidings of salvation, but the sentence of immitigable
doom.

The present traveller in Italy sees with disgust the dim and faded
frescoes in which this doom is portrayed in all its varied refinements
of torture; and the vivid Italian mind ran riot in these lurid fields,
and every monk who wanted to move his audience was in his small way a
Dante. The poet and the artist give only the highest form of the ideas
of their day, and he who cannot read the "Inferno" with firm nerves may
ask what the same representations were likely to have been in the grasp
of coarse and common minds.

The first teachers of Christianity in Italy read the Gospels by the
light of those fiendish fires which consumed their fellows. Daily made
familiar with the scorching, the searing, the racking, the devilish
ingenuities of torture, they transferred them to the future hell of the
torturers. The sentiment within us which asserts eternal justice and
retribution was stimulated to a kind of madness by that first baptism of
fire and blood, and expanded the simple and grave warnings of the gospel
into a lurid poetry of physical torture. Hence, while Christianity
brought multiplied forms of mercy into the world, it failed for many
centuries to humanize the savage forms of justice; and rack and wheel,
fire and fagot were the modes by which human justice aspired to a
faint imitation of what divine justice was supposed to extend through
eternity.

But it is remarkable always to observe the power of individual minds
to draw out of the popular religious ideas of their country only those
elements which suit themselves, and to drop others from their thought.
As a bee can extract pure honey from the blossoms of some plants whose
leaves are poisonous, so some souls can nourish themselves only with the
holier and more ethereal parts of popular belief.

Agnes had hitherto dwelt only on the cheering and the joyous features of
her faith; her mind loved to muse on the legends of saints and angels
and the glories of paradise, which, with a secret buoyancy, she hoped to
be the lot of every one she saw. The mind of the Mother Theresa was of
the same elevated cast, and the terrors on which Jocunda dwelt with such
homely force of language se