Page:On the Desert - Recent Events in Egypt.djvu/198

 purpose as the hospice of the Simplon, or that of the Great St. Bernard, as a refuge for travellers, that is another matter. To the devotion thus displayed I would pay the highest respect. Never did I feel more reverence for any men than for the monks under whose roof I once found shelter on the Pass of the Simplon. If there were the same spirit of self-sacrifice at Sinai as on the Alps, it would be counted worthy of the same honor. Certainly nowhere in the world is such a place of refuge more needed than among these mountains and deserts. But that is quite a different thing from claiming that the Convent which we now find here is an abode of saints, a place of such sacredness that to make a pilgrimage to it is an act of religious merit, and to live in it is to be in the straight and narrow path to heaven.

If I had any secret fondness for the monastic life, a few days in a monastery would be quite sufficient to disenchant me. I feel no temptation to turn monk: the Convent cell would be a prison cell. Indeed a sentence to such a life would be like a sentence to death. The very thought makes me shudder, as if I were descending into a tomb, on which a heavy lid of blackest marble were shutting down upon me. It seems as if one could be driven to this life only by the direst necessity, or by superstitious fear. It is said that Archbishop Hughes was once conversing with some Protestant clergymen in regard to the doctrine of Purgatory, when, after hearing their objections, he ended the discussion by saying "Well, gentlemen, you might go farther and fare worse." This was Irish wit, if it was not argument. Certainly it would require the most lurid prospect of "faring worse" to reconcile me to the purgatory of being buried alive in a monk's cell!

And yet I do not like to part from our companions in the Convent with words of censure. Indeed I feel more