Then how merciful, how wise it was when addressing itself to the feeble and infirm. "The sick shall be served as though they were Christ in person," says Saint Benedict; and his anxiety for his sons, his urgent recommendations to the Superiors to love and visit the younger brethren, to neglect nothing that may assuage their ills, reveals a maternal care that is truly touching on the patriarch's part. "Yes, yes," muttered Durtal, "but there are in this rule other articles which seem less acceptable to miscreants of my stamp. This, for instance: 'No man shall dare to give or to receive anything without the Abbot's permission, or to have or hold anything as his own--absolutely nothing, neither book, nor tablets, nor pointer--in a word, nothing whatever, inasmuch as they are not allowed to call even their body or their will their own.' "This is a terrible sentence of abnegation and obedience," he sighed, "only, is this law, which is binding on the Fathers and the Serving Brothers, equally strict for the Oblates, the aegrotant members of the Benedictine army, who are not mentioned in the text? This remains to be seen. It will be well too to ascertain how far it is applied, for the rule is on the whole so skilful, so elastic, so broad that it can be made at option very austere or very mild. "With the Trappists the ordinances are so closely drawn that they are stifling; with the Benedictines, on the contrary, they would be light and airy enough to allow the soul to breathe easily. One Fraternity clings scrupulously to the letter; the other, on the contrary, draws inspiration from the Spirit of the Saint. "Before goading myself along this road I must consult the Abbe Plomb," was Durtal's conclusion. He went to call on the priest; but he was absent for some days. As a precaution against indolence, a measure of spiritual discipline, he threw himself on the cathedral once more, and tried, now that he was less overpowered by speculation, to read its meaning. The stone text which he was bent on understanding was puzzling, if not difficult to decipher, in consequence of the interpolated passages, repetitions, and parts eliminated or abridged; in fact, to say the truth, as the result of a certain incoherence, accounted for no doubt by the circumstance that the work had been carried on, altered or extended by successive artists during a lapse of two hundred years.