When we consider this death in life, this, suppression of everything which makes life, this annihilation of aims, ambitions, and natural affections, this destruction of love, emotion, and passion, this mere monotony of breathing, this wearisome futility and vanity, this endless iteration of Litanies; when we remember that hundreds of thousands in every Christian country, men and women, voluntarily entered upon this life, knowing beforehand what it was, and that they patiently endured it, we can in some measure realize the intensity and the reality of the torments which they believed to be provided for the vast majority of mankind. There grew up, in the course of years, rich monks and luxurious monks; but in the early days of each order there was the austerity of the Rule. And though here and there we find a brother who rises to a spiritual level far above the letter of his Order, the religion of the ordinary brother was little more than the fear of Hell, with a sense of gratitude to the Saints for snatching him out of the flames. Most of the brethren, again, of the new and more austere Orders, until they became rich, were simple and illiterate. They wanted a rule of life which should give them no chance of committing sin; like women, they desired to be ruled in everything, even the most trivial. At dinner, for instance, they were enjoined to drink with both hands, and to incline the head when served; in church they were not to clinch their hands or to stretch out their legs; the whole day was mapped out for them as it is for boys at school. From primes (the daybreak service) till tierce, spiritual exercises; from tierce till sext, and from nones till vespers, manual labors; once every day private prayer at the altar; silence in the cell; to ask for what was wanted after nones; no conversation in the chapter, the cloisters, or the church; from November till Easter conversation on the customs of the Order; afterwards on the Gospels, and so on. The effect on the common nature would be to produce a breathing machine, incapable of thought, of action, of judgment, with no affections, emotions, or passions. The holy brotherhood becomes a troop of slaves engaged upon a round of trivial duties, kept at a low stage of vitality by scanty food and short sleep. They cease after a while to desire any change; they go on in meekness and submission to the end, their piety measured by their regularity. Now and then among them is found one who frets under the yoke. Either he wants new austerities, like Stephen Harding, or he rises in mad revolt, and before he can be suppressed commits such dreadful sins of rebellion and blasphemy as leave little doubt that after all his pains and privations his chances in the next world are no better than those of the foul-mouthed ruffler outside, whose life has been one long sin, whose death will be caused by a knife in a drunken fray, whose body will be carried in the black