Monastic institutions produce, in this respect, incalculable mischiefs. The sexes, whom these religious prisons seclude from the free and unconfined intercourses of society, suffer their imaginations to riot without restraint or discipline, in proportion to the violence imposed on their actions. A thousand boyish fancies, eager appetites and warm desires, are perpetually playing truant, and the chastity of the soul is corrupted. To effect the conquest of the passion of love, it is absolutely necessary that the evil suggestions of the imagination should be first silenced; and he who succeeds in quelling the insurrections of that turbulent inmate, or in quieting its commotions, achieves an enterprise at once difficult and glorious. The holy Jerome checked the progress of many disorderly passions which he found rising in his breast; but the passion of love resisted all his opposition, and followed him, with increasing fury, even into the frightful cavern to which he retired to implore, in humble prayer and solitary abstraction, the mercies of his God. The solitude, however remote, to which the demon of sensuality is admitted, is soon crowded with legions of tormenting fiends. John, the anchorite of the deserts of Thebais, wisely addressed his solitary brethren, “If there be any among you who in his pride, conceives that he has entirely renounced the devil and all his works, he should learn that it is not sufficient to have done this merely by his lips, by having resigned his worldly dignities, and by dividing his possessions among the poor; for, unless he has also abandoned his sensual appetites, his salvation cannot be secure. It is only by purifying our bosoms from the pernicious influence of this master passion, that we can ever hope to counteract the machinations of satan, and to guard our hearts from his dangerous practices. Sin always introduces itself under the guidance of some guilty passion; some fond desire; some pleasing inclination, which we willingly indulge, and by that means suffer the enemy of peace to establish his unruly dominion in our souls. Then tranquillity and real happiness quit their abode in our hearts, and all is uproar and anarchy within. This must be the fate of all who permit an evil spirit to seat itself on the throne of their hearts, and to scatter around the poisonous seeds of wild desire and vicious inclinations.” But love once indulged in bright and rapturous fancies, fills the mind with such high and transporting ideas of supreme bliss, that the powers of reason are seldom, if ever, capable of making head against its fascinations. The hermit and the monk, who, from the nature of their situations, cannot taste its real charms, ought, if it were for that reason alone, to stifle at their birth the earliest emotions of this inspiring passion; for the indulgence of it must prove fatal to the virtue, and of course destructive to the peace of every recluse. The