Generally speaking, we may premise that the consecration of individuals to a life in which religion is the predominating element, means the abandonment of the ordinary pleasures of the world. This is of the very essence of self-devotion. Sanctity, and the enjoyment of all those things in which the body is largely concerned, have always been regarded as inconsistent and opposite. Hence, in the first line of things prohibited to consecrated persons, we always discover the pleasures of sex. To indulge in these is usually considered the most flagrant outrage against their rules. Next to sexual delights, or equally with them, the luxuries of choice food, rich clothing, comfortable beds, well-furnished rooms, and similar ministrations to physical ease are withheld from the votaries. They are very frequently voluntary paupers or mendicants; or where this is not the case, they usually depend on some endowment derived from the liberality of others. Where their numbers are large, they are placed under rules, and bound to the strictest obedience to their superiors in the same line of life. Moreover, mere abstinence from ordinary pleasures is not enough to prove their devotion; they are called on to undergo extraordinary pains. These vary with the rule of the order, or their own fervor. Sometimes they are obliged to live in rooms which, in the coldest weather, no fire is permitted to cheer; sometimes their sleep is broken by rising at unseasonable hours to worship their deity; sometimes the garment they wear is too thick in summer, and too scanty in winter; and sometimes they tear their own flesh by scourging and flagellation. Fasting, too, is often imposed at certain times. And the zeal of individuals always outruns the compulsory hardships of their position. They will show the intensity of their devotion by fasting more rigorously than others, sleeping on harder couches, bearing greater inflictions. Self-consecration continually tends towards greater and greater self-denial; but the actual degrees of self-denial vary from the mere observance of some simple rules to the extremest possibility of self-torture. Confining ourselves, however, to the general marks which characterize this devotion of persons to religion, we may say that it involves principally two things: chastity and poverty.