Page:Twelve Years in a Monastery (1897).djvu/48

42 toilet tables. In the lavatory a long narrow zinc trough with a few metal basins and a row of taps overhead was provided for our ablutions; I afterwards discovered that, crude as it was, this arrangement was rather luxurious for a friary.

At the end of the quarter the bell rang out its second warning, and all were supposed to be kneeling in their stalls in the choir by that time. The superior’s eye wandered over the room to see if all were present, and any unfortunate delinquent was at once sent for, and would have to do public penance for his fault at dinner. At five the religious exercises began and continued, with half an hour’s interval, until eight o’clock.

The ancient monastic custom of rising at midnight for the purpose of chanting the ‘Office’ finds little favour with modern monks; and even from a religious point of view they are wise. I was enabled to make observations on the custom some years later on the Continent, and I found little to be enthusiastic over, as Roman Catholic writers (usually those who have never tried it) frequently are. A few neurotic devotees enter into the service with their usual fervour, but the vast majority, to whom a religious concentration of thought during an hour’s service is an impossibility even in their most lucid hours, are fatally oppressed with sleep and weariness. In summer they fall asleep in their stalls; in winter the night’s repose is lost, and many constitutions are ruined by the hour or