That he was a sincere believer no one, however, who caught him apart from the presiding influence of his wife believed for a moment. He swore too much for that, and occasionally he had been heard, when sentimental and under the influence of wine, to refer to Cremorne, to Evans’s and the Cider Cellars, to the Closerie du Lilas, to the Mabille, and other places in London and Paris where wicked people, in old times, were wont to enjoy themselves after their kind. Beneath his frosted exterior there was a good deal of the old Adam yet. Once upon a time, according to William of Malmesbury, a merchant named Swelf had been in the habit of calling on the holy St. Wolstan once a year, to receive his advice in the healing of his spiritual ailments. After giving the needed absolution, the prelate observed: ‘You often repeat the sins which you have confessed, because, as the proverb goes, opportunity makes the thief. Wherefore, I advise you to become a monk, which if you do, you will not long have the opportunity for these sins.’ Upon this, the other rejoined that he could not possibly become a monk, because he found it so difficult to bring his mind to it. ‘Go your ways,’ said the bishop, in somewhat of a passion: ‘a monk you will become, whether you choose it or not, but only when the appliances and means of vice have waxen old in you;’ which fact, adds the historian, ‘we afterwards witnessed, because when now broken down by old age, he betook himself to our monastery.’ It was the decay of nature rather than the growth of grace which made that man a monk. What we lack in old age is the power to sin. The body ceases to be the servant of the senses. We lead a better life possibly, from a conventional point of view, but is it not often terribly against the grain? A man gives up a dissipated career because his strength is not equal to its demands. His vitality has been prematurely exhausted.