Page:Twelve Years in a Monastery (1897).djvu/160

 outrun any in the market—if he could devise a brake capable of stopping it when in motion; another explained to me a system of the universe which he had constructed (from certain texts of Genesis) to the utter and final overthrow of materialism—he had explained it to several professors of science, who had admitted its force in silence, and I found myself in the same predicament. Some took to mending clocks, of which they had a number in their cells, others to painting, others to gardening, others to making collections of little pictures of the Virgin or St. Joseph or of miraculous statues. Few of them spent any large proportion of their time in what even a Catholic would consider the service of humanity.

The little knowledge they possessed was usually confined to liturgy and casuistry. Not being parish priests they had not the advantage of daily visits amongst the laity, which is the only refining influence and almost the only stimulus to education of a celibate clergy; and the little preaching and ministerial work they were entrusted with, lying almost exclusively amongst the poor, did not demand any serious thought or study. There are always a few ripe scholars amongst them—very few at the present time—but the majority profess to base their undisguised aversion for study on the letter and spirit of their constitutions and not without reason, though they forget that the age to which that rule was adapted has passed away for ever. There is no pressure upon them, yet their ordinary