night on the Lake
of Gennesaret, between Gadara and Galilee, in the bark which other
wave-tossed barks followed through the roaring darkness. He was there,
praying as on that other night, alone, on the hillside. He was there,
saying with His sweet eternal voice: "Come unto Me all ye who suffer,
all ye who are heavy laden, come unto Me." He was there and speaking,
the living Christ: "Believe in Me, for I am with you; I am your
strength, and I am peace. I the Humble, son of the Almighty; I the Meek,
son of the Terrible; I who prepare hearts for the kingdom of justice,
for the future union of all with Me in My Father." He, the Merciful, was
there in the tabernacle, breathing the ineffable invitation: "Come, open
thy heart; give thyself up to Me!"

And Clemente gave himself up, confiding to Him what he had never
confessed even to himself. He felt that everything in the ancient
monastery was dying, save Christ in the tabernacle. As the germ-cell
of ecclesiastical organism, the centre from which Christian warmth
irradiates upon the world, the monastery was becoming ossified by the
action of inexorable age. Within its walls noble fires of faith
and piety, enclosed--like the flames of the candles burning on the
altars--in traditional forms, were consuming their human envelope, their
invisible vapours rising towards heaven, but sending no wave of heat or
of light to vibrate beyond the ancient walls. Currents of living air no
longer swept through the monastery, and the monks no longer, as in the
first centuries, went out in search of them, labouring in the woods and
in the fields, co-operating with the vital energies of nature while
they praised God in song. His talks with Giovanni Selva had brought him
indirectly, and little by little, to feel thus regarding the monastic
life in its present form, although he was convinced that it has
indestructible roots in the human soul. But now, perhaps for the first
time, he looked his belief squarely in the face. For a long time his
wish and his hope had been that Benedetto might become a great gospel
labourer; not an ordinary labourer, a preacher, a confessor, but an
extraordinary labourer; not a soldier of the regular army, hampered
by uniform and discipline, but a free champion of the Holy Spirit. The
monastic laws had never before appeared to him in such fierce antagonism
with his ideal of a modern saint. And now, what if the Divine Will
concerning Benedetto should reveal itself contrar