The standard of piety and breeding likely to be acquired by children in medieval nunneries must have differed considerably from time to time and from house to house. CHAPTER VII ROUTINE AND REACTION Where is the pain that does not become deadened after a thousand years? or what is the nature of that pleasure or happiness which never wearies by monotony? Earthly pleasures and pains are short in proportion as they are keen; of any others, which are both intense and lasting, we can form no idea.... To beings constituted as we are, the monotony of singing Psalms would be as great an affliction as the pains of hell and might even be pleasantly interrupted by them. JOWETT, Introduction to Plato's _Phaedo_. St Benedict's common sense is nowhere more strikingly shown than in his division of the routine of monastic life between the three occupations of divine service, manual labour and reading. Not only has this arrangement the merit of developing the different sides of men's natures, spirit, body and brain, but it fulfils a deep psychological necessity. The essence of communal life is regularity, but no human being can subsist without a further ingredient of variety. St Benedict knew well enough that unless he provided the stimulus of change within the Rule, outraged nature would seek for it outside. Hence the careful adjustment of occupations to combine variety with regularity. The services were the supreme joy and duty of the monk and nun and the life of the convent was centred in its church. But these services were not excessively long and were divided from each other by periods of sleep by night and of work, or study, or meditation by day, after the manner which Crashaw inimitably set forth in his _Description of a Religious House and Condition of Life_: A hasty portion of prescribed sleep; Obedient slumbers, that can wake and weep, And sing, and sigh, and work, and sleep again; Still rolling a round sphere of still-returning pain. Hands full of hearty labours; pains that pay And prize themselves; do much, that more they may, And work for work, not wages; let tomorrow's New drops wash off the sweat of this day's sorrows. A long and daily-dying life, which breathes A respiration of reviving deaths.