Now since the moral faculties bear this common stamp upon them, that they are those which oppose to the temptations of personal gratification the sense of duty to something outside ourselves, and since, when these two clash, the claim of the moral law is always to be obeyed, it is inevitable that men will sometimes take the denial of personal gratification for an end _per se_ and attach to it a notion of peculiar holiness and purity. And this error will be intensified by the ancient and inveterate habit of regarding the Supreme Being as a malignant Power, to be propitiated by suffering. Thus we get the false sanction with its Ascetic ideal which has appeared so often in history. It is the other extreme to licence, and rests equally on disregard for the rational ideal of Sophrosyne or Temperance which lies between them. Yet it may truly be said that asceticism has its due place in the world. The ascetic life cannot indeed be the ideal life for any one who holds that plenitude of life is the true ideal. But it may be the best life for this or that individual. A nature maimed or scathed from birth, or by unhappy fortune, may best be able to realize itself in complete withdrawal from the interests of ordinary social life. Such withdrawal may also be necessary for the pioneer or leader of a cause, for a great reformer, for a teacher absorbed in his mission. Philosophy, in fact, has its saints and ascetics as well as any religion that rests on extra-natural sanctions. But in each case the ascetic ideal rests on quite a different basis. Looking broadly at the part which religious Orders have played in the religious and intellectual history of Europe, it may well be doubted whether even the most gracious and human figure in the history of asceticism, Francis of Assisi, would not have better served his time and land by the natural development, in secular life and activity, of the beautiful if sometimes wildly ebullient character portrayed in the records of his youth, than by cutting away half his life in order to force the other half into a distorted rarity. In recognizing the beauty and sweetness of his nature let us not be misled into attributing it in any degree to the influence of that fatal miasma from a faith more ancient than any religion which has a name and place on earth to-day, the dim terror of the unseen which has embodied itself for ages in expiatory sacrifices and rites of blood and pain.