Page:Twelve Years in a Monastery (1897).djvu/65

Rh all have combined to postpone the unfolding of Nature’s most wondrous gift until he shall have blindly abdicated it for ever. In the confessional I have known students of a much more advanced age who were still unconscious of its power. In fact the Church knows that they are unconscious, and expects them to be unconscious; for if she awaited the full development of mind and body in her candidates her clergy would never be sufficiently recruited.

The proportion of nuns who take the vow of chastity at an early age is smaller, as I have said but the sin is more grievous. The life of the nun who finds in later life that she has made a mistake is infinitely more wretched; the priest is in the world and frequently of it, the nun is jealously imprisoned in the walls of her convent. No doubt her vow is usually only a ‘simple’ vow and theoretically dispensable; but who ever knew a nun to write to Rome for a dispensation? No woman would dare to face the practical ignominy of such a step.

I have never been able to witness without a shudder the ceremony of a young girl making her vows. Some pachydermatous monk or veneered Jesuit preaches to her from the altar of the tranquil joy of her future life as spouse of Christ alone, and the candid virginal eyes that are bent upon him tell only too clearly of her profound ignorance of the sleeping fires within her, the latent joys of love and maternity which she sacrifices so readily. In ten