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.