hose vaults of
fire-for ever! Was the thought bearable!--was it possible! Millions
upon millions burning forever for Adam's fall .... Could God be just in
that?....

It was the temptation of a fiend! He had entered the unhallowed
precincts, where devils still lingered about their ancient shrines; he
had let his eyes devour the abominations of the heathen, and given place
to the devil. He would flee home to confess it all to his father. He
would punish him as he deserved, pray for him, forgive him. And yet
could he tell him all? Could he, dare he confess to him the whole
truth--the insatiable craving to know the mysteries of learning--to see
the great roaring world of men, which had been growing up in him slowly,
month after month, till now it had assumed this fearful shape? He
could stay no longer in the desert. This world which sent all souls to
hell--was it as bad as monks declared it was? It must be, else how could
such be the fruit of it? But it was too awful a thought to be taken on
trust. No; he must go and see.

Filled with such fearful questionings, half-inarticulate and vague, like
the thoughts of a child, the untutored youth went wandering on, till
he reached the edge of the cliff below which lay his home. It lay
pleasantly enough, that lonely Laura, or lane of rude Cyclopean cells,
under the perpetual shadow of the southern wall of crags, amid its grove
of ancient date-trees. A branching cavern in the cliff supplied the
purposes of a chapel, a storehouse, and a hospital; while on the sunny
slope across the glen lay the common gardens of the brotherhood, green
with millet, maize, and beans, among which a tiny streamlet, husbanded
and guided with the most thrifty care, wandered down from the cliff
foot, and spread perpetual verdure over the little plot which voluntary
and fraternal labour had painfully redeemed from the inroads of the
all-devouring sand. For that garden, like everything else in the Laura,
except each brother's seven feet of stone sleeping-hut, was the common
property, and therefore the common care and joy of all. For the common
good, as well as for his own, each man had toiled up the glen with his
palm-leaf basket of black mud from the river Nile, over whose broad
sheet of silver the glen's mouth yawned abrupt. For the common good,
each man had swept the ledges clear of sand, and sown in the scanty
artificial soil, the harvest of which all were to share alike. To
buy clothes, books, and chape