Page:On the Desert - Recent Events in Egypt.djvu/194

 order? This question is answered by considering how these communities are formed. Men do not always join them from religious motives. Many enter a monastery as a refuge from poverty. In the Greek Church some of the barefooted orders are replenished as the Shakers are replenished in America, by recruits taken out of the poorhouse. Some of the brethren here are not a whit above men who could be picked out of any decent almshouse. I do not see really bad faces, but they are common and coarse — faces with which one cannot associate any idea of spirituality. One or two of the younger ones look as if they were half-witted. These join the Convent, not from any religious impulse or inspiration, but as a security against want. They enter as laics, and are put to do menial offices. Some are mere scullions: they wash the dishes, they clean the lamps: and if, after four or five years, they are approved, they are received as full members of the order. Their priestly functions may depend on something else than learning or piety. One of the novitiates, hearing that Dr. Post was a physician, came to him for medicine to make his hair grow, for he said he could not celebrate the mass till he had a beard! He is now twenty-one, and his beard is but downy. The Doctor, who was much amused at the request, advised him to send to Suez or Cairo for a bottle of Mrs. Allen's Hair Restorer! This is a new qualification for a monk on Mount Sinai!

But there is something worse than ignorance. They are either the most credulous or the most untruthful of human beings: for they are the propagators of the grossest superstitions. Never were there such gross absurdities as those which they gravely repeat as facts of sacred history. Near the foot of Ras Sufsafeh is a granite boulder, which being, as an Irishman would say, "quite