There was certainly nothing of the Church in all this ceremony, and Sir Monier Williams very properly guards us from applying to it the sacred word of ordination.[280] Any one who cares to read the texts in which the proceedings are described will be inclined to think that the questions put to the novice, in their childishness and absurdity, seem diabolically framed to caricature the solemn and soul-searching questions addressed to candidates for the Holy Ministry. Yet in the instruction given to the newly admitted member, concerning the “four chief forbidden acts” from which he must abstain, and “the four resources”[281] in which he was to trust, there was a touch of the solemnity which belongs to the charge which follows Christian ordination. The monk was reminded that in regard to what was pleasant and permissible to other men he had subjected himself to self-denial and a yoke. He might receive from the pious, without offence, offerings of food and clothing, and medicine and shelter, but he must be prepared for the hard life of one whose food might only be scraps and refuse put into his bowl, whose clothing might have to be made of cast-off rags, whose shelter might often be the tree in the jungle or the cave in the rock, and whose medicine might be only the foul deposit of the cattle-pen. He was warned that any breach of the four cardinal precepts—against unchastity, which to him meant what to others was the lawful estate of marriage, against theft, even of a blade of grass, against murder, even to the crushing of a flea, against assumption of virtues not really possessed,—would necessitate expulsion from the Order. “For even as a man whose head is cut off cannot live with the trunk; ... as a dry leaf separate from the stalk can never again become green; ... as a stone split in two cannot be made into one; ... as a palm whose top is destroyed cannot again grow, so the monk who breaks the least of these laws is no longer a Samana, no longer a follower of the Sakya-putta.”[282]