Leaving, however, for the present, the meaning of monastic asceticism, it seems necessary to insist that there really was such a thing; there is no doubt about it. If the particular actions told of each saint are not literally true, as belonging to him, abundance of men did for many centuries lead the sort of life which they are said to have led. We have got a notion that the friars were a snug, comfortable set, after all; and the life in a monastery pretty much like that in a modern university, where the old monks' language and affectation of unworldliness does somehow contrive to co-exist with as large a mass of bodily enjoyment as man's nature can well appropriate; and very likely this was the state into which many of the monasteries had fallen in the fifteenth century. It had begun to be, and it was a symptom of a very rapid disorder in them, promptly terminating in dissolution; but long, long ages lay behind the fifteenth century, in which wisely or foolishly these old monks and hermits did make themselves a very hard life of it; and the legend only exceeded the reality, in being a very slightly idealized portrait of it. We are not speaking of the miracles; that is a wholly different question. When men knew little of the order of nature, whatever came to pass without an obvious cause was at once set down to influences beyond nature and above it; and so long as there were witches and enchanters, strong with the help of the bad powers, of course the especial servants of God would not be left without graces to outmatch and overcome the devil. And there were many other reasons why the saints should work miracles. They had done so under the old dispensation, and there was no obvious reason why Christians should be worse off than Jews. And again, although it be true, in the modern phrase, which is beginning to savour a little of cant, that the highest natural is the highest supernatural, it is not everybody that is able to see that; natural facts permit us to be so easily familiar with them, that they have an air of commonness; and when we have a vast idea to express, there is always a disposition to the extraordinary. But the miracles are not the chief thing; nor ever were they so. Men did not become saints by working miracles, but they worked miracles because they had become saints; and the instructiveness and value of their lives lay in the means which they had used to make themselves what they were: and as we said, in this part of the business there is unquestionable basis of truth-- scarcely even exaggeration. We have documentary evidence, which has been passed through the sharp ordeal of party hatred, of the way some men (and those, men of vast mind and vast influence in their day, not mere ignorant fanatics,) conducted themselves, where myth has no room to enter. We know something of the hair-shirt of Thomas a Becket, and other uneasy penances of his; and there was another poor monk, whose asceticism imagination could not easily outrun: