Page:Twelve Years in a Monastery (1897).djvu/159

 many earnest and devout men who are never idle for a moment, but the majority lead the most dull and inactive lives.

At Louvain there were nine priests and hardly sufficient work to occupy the time of four. There was one earnest exemplary friar who was constantly and usefully occupied; another, equally earnest but differing in method, would exhaust himself one fortnight and recuperate during the next; the remainder led a life of most unenviable inaction—some, under one pretext or another, did absolutely nothing from one end of the week to the other. They were no students—indeed, most of them were grossly ignorant, and their large library was practically unused. In summer they would lounge in the garden or bask at the windows of their cells until the bell rang out the next signal for some vapid religious exercise; in winter they would crowd round their stove and discuss the daily paper or some point of ritual or casuistry, eager as children for the slightest distraction.

Many of them, indeed, between idleness and eccentricity had developed most extraordinary manias. One of our priests, a venerable old friar whose only sacerdotal duties consisted in blessing babies and giving the peasantry recipes (in the form of prayers) for diseased cattle, had succeeded in getting himself appointed as assistant cook. Another friar devoted his time to the solution of the problem of perpetual motion; another had designed a cycle which was to