At last, the period appointed by the Prior for my seclusion in the vaults was over, and, by his express command, I was obliged to remove from thence, in order to finish the remainder of my penance in the convent, although my cell was yet to be separated from all the other brethren; for, by such gradations, I was at last to arrive at his permission to return to the church, and to the society of the monks. But with the latter gradations of penance I was not myself satisfied. I was enjoined only solitude and a daily use of the knotted rope; but I stedfastly refused every better sort of food which was now offered to me; and when at last allowed to enter the church, I lay for whole days on the cold marble floor, before the shrine of St Rosalia, and chastised myself in my cell in the most cruel and immoderate degree. By these outward sufferings, I thought that I should overcome the more fearful pains by which I was inwardly tormented, but in vain! Those phantoms, the off-spring of my own perturbed imagination, always returned, and I believed myself given up a helpless prey to Satan, who thus, for his own special divertisement, assailed me, and enticed me to commit those sins in _thought_, which in _deed_ were no longer in my power. The severe penance imposed upon me, and the unheard-of perseverance with which it was fulfilled, excited in the highest degree the attention of the monks. They contemplated me with a kind of reverential awe, and many times I heard whisperings among them--"He is indeed a saint!" This expression was to me unspeakably distressing, for it reminded me vividly of that moment in the Capuchin Convent of Königswald, when, in my outrageous delirium, I had called out to the spectral painter, "I am the blessed St Anthony!" The very last and concluding stage of the penance imposed by the Prior, had now passed away, yet I had never desisted from self-martyrdom. Nature seemed unable to bear up any longer against the violence which I inflicted. My eyes were dim and sunk in their sockets. My bleeding frame was become a mere skeleton, so that, when for hours I had lain on the marble floor, I was not able to raise myself till the monks came to assist me. At last, the Prior one day sent for me to his consulting-room. "Brother," said he, "do you now feel, after the severe penance you have undergone, your mind soothed and lightened? Have the consolations of Heaven been poured upon you?" In the hollow tone of despair, I answered him, "No!"