A similar system of discipline is manifested in the detailed statement of the regulations of the Egyptian monasteries left us by John Cassianus, Abbot of St. Victor of Marseilles, who died in 448. No vows or religious ceremonies were required of the postulant for admission. He was proved by ten days’ waiting at the gate, and a year’s probation inside, yet the slender tie between him and the community is shown by the preservation of his worldly garments, to be returned to him in case of his expulsion for disobedience or discontent, and also by the refusal to receive from him the gift of his private fortune—although no one within the sacred walls was permitted to call the simplest article his own—lest he should leave the convent and then claim to revoke his donation, as not unfrequently happened in institutions which neglected this salutary rule.[206] So, in a series of directions for cenobitic life, appended to a curious Arabic version of the Nicene canons, the punishment provided for persistent disobedience and turbulence is expulsion of the offender from the monastery.[207] As a temporary refuge from the trials of life, where the soul could be strengthened by seclusion, meditation, peaceful labor, and rigid discipline, thousands must have found the institution of Monachism most beneficial who had not resolution enough to give themselves up to a life of ascetic devotion and privation. These facilities for entrance and departure, however, only rendered more probable the admission of the turbulent and the worldly; and the want of stringent and effective regulations must have rendered itself every day more apparent, as the holy multitudes waxed larger and more difficult to manage, and as the empire became covered with wandering monks, described by St. Augustin as beggars, swindlers, and peddlers of false relics, who resorted to the most shameless mendacity to procure the means of sustaining their idle and vagabond life.[208]