From this period his choice was made. As soon as his health was restored, he determined to bid adieu to the world. After having, like Luther, shared in one more repast with his old companions in arms, he departed alone, in great secrecy,[251] for the solitary dwellings that the hermits of St. Benedict had hewn out of the rocks of Montserrat. Impelled not by a sense of sin or his need of Divine grace, but by a desire to become a "knight of the Virgin," and of obtaining renown by mortifications and pious works, after the example of the whole army of saints, he confessed for three days together, gave his rich attire to a beggar, put on sackcloth, and girt himself with a rope.[252] Then, remembering the celebrated armed vigils of Amadis of Gaul, he suspended his sword before an image of Mary, passed the night in watching in his new and strange costume, and sometimes on his knees, sometimes upright, but always in prayer and with the pilgrim's staff in his hand, he repeated all the devout practices that the illustrious Amadis had observed before him. "It was thus," says his biographer, the Jesuit Maffei, "that while Satan was arming Luther against all laws human and divine, and while that infamous heresiarch appeared at Worms, and impiously declared war against the apostolic see, Christ, by a call from his heavenly providence, was awakening this new champion, and binding him, and those who were to follow in his steps, to the service of the Roman pontiff, and opposing him to the licentiousness and fury of heretical depravity."[253] [251] Ibi duce amicisque ita salutatis, ut arcana consiliorum suorum quam accuratissime tegeret. Maffei, p. 16. [252] Pretiosa vestimenta quibus erat ornatus, pannoso cuidam largitus, sacco sese alacer induit ac fune præcinxit. Ibid. p. 20. [253] Furori ac libidini hæreticæ pravitatis opponeret. Maffei, p. 21. [Sidenote: COMPUNCTIONS OF CONSCIENCE.] Loyola, although still lame in one of his legs, dragged himself by winding and lonely paths to Manresa, where he entered a Dominican convent, in order to devote himself in this secluded spot to the severest mortifications. Like Luther, he daily begged his bread from door to door.[254] He passed seven hours upon his knees, and scourged himself three times a-day; at midnight he rose to pray; he allowed his hair and nails to grow, and in the thin pale face of the monk of Manresa it would have been impossible to recognise the young and brilliant knight of Pampeluna. [254] Victum osteatim precibus, infimis emendicare quotidie. Ibid. p. 23. [Sidenote: ANGUISH--LUTHER AND LOYOLA.]