In such hours prayer
ceases to be an act of the will, and resembles more some overpowering
influence which floods the soul from without, bearing all its faculties
away on its resistless tide.
Brought up from infancy to feel herself in a constant circle of
invisible spiritual agencies, Agnes received this wave of intense
feeling as an impulse inspired and breathed into her by some celestial
spirit, that thus she should be made an interceding medium for a soul in
some unknown strait or peril. For her faith taught her to believe in an
infinite struggle of intercession in which all the Church Visible and
Invisible were together engaged, and which bound them in living bonds of
sympathy to an interceding Redeemer, so that there was no want or woe
of human life that had not somewhere its sympathetic heart, and its
never-ceasing prayer before the throne of Eternal Love. Whatever may be
thought of the actual truth of this belief, it certainly was far more
consoling than that intense individualism of modern philosophy which
places every soul alone in its life-battle,--scarce even giving it a God
to lean upon.
CHAPTER XI.
THE CONFESSIONAL.
The reader, if a person of any common knowledge of human nature,
will easily see the direction in which a young, inexperienced, and
impressible girl would naturally be tending under all the influences
which we perceive to have come upon her.
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