It was as if a door leading out of some gay ballroom, all lights and flowers and dance music, had suddenly been opened and I had passed through it from the things of time to those of eternity. Fifteen hundred years were wiped out—I saw St. Benedict, the “beloved, called from the cleft in the rock,” praying, rejoicing, hiding from men to be alone with God. And that seems to me the most wonderful thing in the lives of the great Founders—they had not at first the smallest forethought of their mission. They only knew that they must save their souls in fear and trembling, and in blind humility they withdrew from all occasions of sin and prayed for purification. It forms a curious contrast to the life led by most of us who consider ourselves pretty decent Christians in the eyes of the world. _Our_ question is, “How much pleasure and amusement can I get in without actually falling into mortal sin?” and many a dangerous permission we grant ourselves or wring from our unwilling directors, that refused would have prevented, or at least delayed, a hundred falls. It is so terribly easy to do what all the rest are doing—to go and see the problem play, read the interesting bad book, pay the visit at the country house where the old admirer will meet us and spread the old snares for our destruction and his own! We know all about it; it has happened so often; but we go ahead, telling our hearts the lie they know so well: “Oh, it doesn’t matter! I know just where to stop!” Steeped in affection to sin—with, at the best, ages of Purgatory awaiting us—we add every straw we can gather to our already huge burden and imagine we can lay it down with a good deathbed confession and slip into Paradise with the best! Very different was the point of view of the great Saints. For one who was converted late in life, we read of scores to whom Perfection called in the very dawn of reason; and it is precisely these, who never committed a mortal sin in their lives, who were most severe with themselves—most nervous, as we should say—about their final salvation.