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200 Saint Benedict, Saint Thomas à Kempis, Eugénie de Guérin, he leads on to a consideration of the spiritual energy that brings the clarifying of vision, to be derived by the solitary or the recluse from the garden, the library, the oratory, and shows with great sympathy, but equal force, how from these the recollected recluse has achieved, and always may, "that peace the world cannot give," that world "absorbed in animal existence" where "cowboys afoot might as well try to stop a stampede of maddened steers as the reasoning few to guide the course of the multitude." It is this cloistered life that reveals reality. "In the monastic system we shall find recorded a great part of whatever success men have achieved in their search for spiritual wisdom," for "faith and imagination are the two distinguishing habits of mind, the two factors of knowledge, the two primal conditions of human existence; without them the senses and reason would be the very shadow of vanity," and it is faith and imagination that are destroyed by life as it is lived now, but edified in hermitage or cloister.

All this was and is a commonplace of Catholicism—not to speak of the East whether Buddhist or Brahmin—but the significant thing is that one should achieve this truth by paths in no way Catholic and should give it forth in this day and generation. Nothing could be dreamed of less consonant with contemporary methods and motives than the life of withdrawal, meditation, prayer, and intercession. All we think of, conceive of as desirable and potent, is an everlasting doing of something, it really doesn't very much matter what, so long as it means efficiency and mass-production; commissions, conferences, committees, conventions, drives, campaigns, and legislation. The spiritual quest, the retreat into the wilderness unstained by radios, motor cars, advertising, newspapers, bond-salesmen, and insurance solicitors; the desirability of getting acquainted with one's soul, and through this, with God—these are the things that at the most moderate estimate are regarded with indifference by the world, which has gone its troubled way with far other goals in view and by immeasurably alien paths. That success has been the issue is a thesis hardly tenable, but in the chaos of failure there are few that envisage the right way. What happens, by some intractable fate, is paralleled by our political and social courses, where, in some nominal monarchy, a popularized parliamentary system breaks down in venality and incom-