His intercourse with the nuns inspired him with a great desire to embrace a religious life, but, like St. Odo, he sought in vain for any religious house in his own part of the country where religious discipline still flourished. So first he joined the company of a recluse of Verdun, named Humbert, and then he passed some time with a hermit in the forest of Argonne, and at last, in company with Bernacer of Metz, who was a tolerable scholar, he set out on pilgrimage to Rome. However, even in Italy he found nothing that exactly suited him, and returning to Verdun, resumed his former exercises of prayer and study, under the direction of Humbert. About the same time Einold, Archdeacon of Toul, had been touched with similar desires after a perfect life; and distributing all his goods to the poor, he shut himself up in a little cell adjoining the cloisters of his cathedral, together with his books and his priestly vestments, living only on what the Bishop Gauzelin sent him as an alms. The times were, indeed, dreary enough, when, one after another, these good men were to be found seeking, and seeking in vain, for some spot untouched by the spoiler’s hand. As Einold prayed for guidance, what seemed a little schoolboy’s voice in the street outside chanted the words, “I will give you the heritage of your father Jacob;” and half disposed to take the words as a sign of divine encouragement, he was still pondering over their meaning, when Humbert of Verdun came to ask his counsel. To be brief, the four friends, Einold, Humbert, John, and Bernacer, determined on migrating to Italy, and establishing themselves either among the solitaries of Mount Vesuvius, or in the neighbourhood of Monte Cassino. And it was this little knot of holy men, who had been drawn together by the ties of Christian sympathy, whom Adalberon proposed to detain in France for the purpose of entrusting them with the restoration of monastic life in the abbey of Gorze. They accepted his offer; a very few of the old monks who yet survived were brought back, and willingly accepted the strict reform which Adalberon desired to establish; Einold was chosen abbot, and the house soon became a model of good discipline. Sacred studies were at once instituted in the school, and after his religious profession, John of Gorze, as he was henceforth called, entered on rather a wider range of reading than he had hitherto been able to follow. We find him applying himself to St. Augustine, and working with characteristic energy at certain logical studies, which were, however, cut short by the prohibition of Einold, who desired him to leave logic for secular students, and to confine himself to more spiritual subjects, an injunction which he humbly and promptly obeyed. He became abbot of Gorze about the year 960.