Slowly the monastic spell cast its glamour over his intellect. Once he had accepted the world as a place of suffering and a punishment, the ascetics filled his imagination—the nuns and priests “athirst for sorrow, drunk with self-sacrifice,” who bury themselves in cloisters or go into life-banishment beyond the outermost pales of civilization. His great pity for the suffering of the world drew his bowed regard to the cloistered orders, the Carmelites and the poor Clares who are chosen by the Christ as victims of expiation, who unite together and gladly accept for their agony the expiation of the temptations of the world outside—who go to the deepest suffering, the prevention of sin by “substitution,” taking the place of them that are too weak to withstand the passions, and taking that place only by going through the full urgings of such passions. Saint Teresa who took the temptations of the soul of a priest who had not the strength to endure them; Sister Catherine Emmerich who took the bodily pains of the sick; Ludwine who “lusted for bodily suffering and was greedy for wounds,” the “reaper of punishments,” he brooded with envy upon the self-inflicted tortures of the Benedictine nuns of the Blessed Sacrament, their austere day, their rising at two in the night to chant, summer and winter, their turns before the tapers of reparation and the altar. He thought of all these orders vowed to obedience, absolute and without reserve—the complete surrender to the superior, of their life, their movements, their actions, their will, their judgment, their bodies, their instincts, their emotions. And when he dwelt upon the contemplative orders, buried alive in their monasteries and convents, he was overwhelmed. These people had mastered the whole gamut of the conquest over the desires of life....
The monastic orders passed before him in sombre pageant. The black robe of Saint Benedict—had not his order kept learning alive? until learning was become dangerous. These men, clad in sombre sable, had been amongst the gentlemen of the world—and its scholars. The contemplative Carthusian, the ascetic Cistercian, the gentle Franciscan. The Jesuit, byword of subtlety and finesse and trickery—it is true he had walked in crooked ways to his goal, but he had had this wondrous church for goal.... The Dominican—no, he shrank back from the accursed white robe of him that had stood before the inquisitorial fires and the like tortures of his hellish devising, holding the sullied crucifix of the great-souled Christ to the agonized eyes of the writhing victims of his foul lust for cruelties. To save from the brutalities of life by inflicting harsher brutalities—this had been to plumb the criminal deeps of filthiness....
Yes, he had his hesitations, the youth.
His mind misgave him a little at the conceits and fooleries and the indifferent yawnings of the choristers, at the absent-minded recital of prayers uttered by the often weary priesthood, at the beadles’ sharp eye on the fees. It misgave him still more when he thought upon the death in life which the nuns of the contemplative orders set themselves—when he learnt that the age of twenty-nine was a terrible period for the young woman to pass, that their worst punishment was endured in those hours of agony in the passionate regret for maternity when the barren womb revolts—when he learnt that some nuns, killed by the torpor of the cloisters, languish and die suddenly like the flames of candles blown out by the wind. Nay, he clutched his throat in sudden loathing and disgust and anger as he read Saint Teresa’s order in her Way of Perfection, that the nun who shall be guilty of insubordination should at once and for life be imprisoned in her cell.
Yet——
Contemplation, prayer, pity, self-repression, asceticism! The strenuous urging of life did not find a loophole there through which to enter in, with disturbing energetic breath and organic instincts and the jumping blood of adventure. And if these things secured the refuge from the cruel struggle of living, why not accept the whole of the rest, the formalities, the etiquette, the infallibility of its pontiffs, the real presence in the wafer in the priest’s mouth, the confession to the priesthood, the surrender of the body and of the intellect and of the will and the conscience to the Church that “orders the body to be silent and the soul to suffer,” and holds that “true life begins not at birth but at death”?
CHAPTER LXXVII
Wherein Foul Things are Plotted with some Glamour of Romance