it was necessary to wall him up in eternal seclusion. In accordance with this pious regard for their brother's sanctity, they adepted summary measures for its forcible execution. Silence, gloom and solitude, according most congenially with the designs of the monastic institutions, they were generally located in sterile wastes, dense and trackless forests, and other localities adapted to excite the sensation of loneliness, dreariness and desolation; but when secular considerations suggested they occupied picturesque and luxuriant localities, commanding the sublimest prospects of Nature. These edifices, which often rivalled gorgeous palaces, were nothing but religious penitentiaries, in which the inmates endured all the privations, and were shackled with all the irons with which criminals are punished in ordinary penal institutions; and though they were ostensibly constructed for religious purposes, they were really designed for the infliction of punishment, in accordance with the ecclesiastical code. With regard to this code Guizot says: "The Catholic Church did not draw up a code like ours, which took account only of those crimes that are at the same time offensive to morals and dangerous to Society, and punishing them only because they bore this two-fold character; but prepared a catalogue of all those actions, criminal more particularly in a moral point of view, and punished all under the name of sins." (Gen. Hist. Civil., Lee. x., p. 118). In what light these religious penitentiaries have been regarded by their inmates their eternal seclusion has prevented them from publicly divulging, but the few who have broken their enthralment, and the "heretics" who have been confined in them, have described them as the most intolerable of dungeons. In fact the modern penitentiary system has originated from them. Guizot thinks this is one of the great blessings which Catholicism has bestowed on society--(see Gen. Hist. Civil., Lect. vi., p. 135).