he lay before the monastery door five days without eating, to what God had called him; for what work he was predestined, when he coiled the rope about his body. The Spirit had breathed, and he had followed the impulse, and now he wrought what the tongue of a prophet could not have affected. And it was worth the pain of that rope torn from his bleeding body; it was recompense for those long fastings. "Three winters, that my soul might grow to Thee, I lived up there on yonder mountain side; My right leg chain'd into the crag, I lay Pent in a roofless close of ragged stones; Inswathed sometimes in wandering mist, and twice Black'd with Thy branding thunder, and sometimes Sucking the damps for drink, and eating not." It was worth all this, if souls could be added to the Lord, as they were, by hundreds and thousands. God's ways are not as our ways. The God who needed these souls, called up the soul of Simeon to do the work, and Simeon obeyed, and traversed perhaps the most awful path man has yet trod. It is not for us to condemn a mode of life which there is no need for men to follow now. It was needed then, and he is rightly numbered with the Saints, who submitted his will to that of God, to make of him an instrument for His purpose in the way that He saw best. "There came from Arabena a certain good man," says Theodoret, "who, when he had come to that mountain peak, 'Tell me,' he cried, 'by the very Truth, art thou a man, or of incorporeal nature?' But when all there were displeased with the question, the Saint bade them all be silent, and bade them set a ladder to the column, and bade the man come up; and first look at his hands, and then feel inside his cloak of skins, and see not only his feet, but also a severe ulcer in them. But when he saw that he was a man, and the size of that sore, and learnt from him how he took nourishment, he came down and told me all."