I will sing a new song unto thee, O God:
Upon a psaltery of ten strings will I sing praises unto thee."
As the last triumphant words of the refrain slowly died away, Annys was conducted to the altar, where he again prostrated himself, while the Abbot offered up a special prayer for his salvation and made the sign of the cross over him. No longer was he under the ban of the Church. He rested on her bosom as a wearied child spent with sobs.
XXII
But the peace that Annys had so fondly hoped for in the monastery was farther away from him than ever. The week that followed was a daily, hourly struggle with the devil within him. With a body scarce kept alive by the scant portion of food which he permitted himself but once a day, in the hopes of conquering the awful sway of the senses, in reality he was innocently making their hold the stronger upon him.
In his wild passion for repentance his once clear vision of the follies of Manichæism left him, and he plunged into the false notion of the monastic world that passions can be killed by killing the body. The faintness caused by lack of food, the cramps in his limbs from constant kneeling, made him unable to sleep. Instead, the nights passed in a kind of waking semi-consciousness, filled with horrible dreams of beautiful women alluringly holding out their arms to him, and then, as he was about to clasp them, changing into dreadful fiends, grinning and spitting fire at him. Or else he thought that women were pressing kisses upon his lips, and faint from the strength of his emotions, his weak body could endure no more. Enraged by the torments, he sought to escape them by castigating himself afresh. As others had done before him, so he tried to forget the existence of his body by making himself exquisitely conscious of every aching, throbbing inch of it.
The methods of monasticism were a failure in subduing the carnal nature of man. Few monks were like St. Pœmen, who, when accused of thinking too much of his body, defended his right to wash his feet by declaring that he had learned to kill, not his body, but his passions.