same acts
at the same hours, lie confines himself to a cycle of habits which are
forces, and which keep growing since they are ever turning the inward
balance on the same side through the ever-increasing weight of his
entire past. Through eating and lodging together, through a communion
of prayer, through incessant contact with other brethren of the same
religious observances, through the precaution taken to join with him one
companion when he goes out and two companions when he lodges elsewhere,
through his visits to and fro to the head establishment, he lives in a
circle of souls strained to the same extent, by the same processes,
to the same end as himself, and whose visible zeal maintains his
own.--Grace, in this state of things, abounds. Such is the term bestowed
on the silent and steady, or startling and brusque, emotion by which
the Christian enters into communication with the invisible world, an
aspiration and a hope, a presentiment and a divination, and even often a
distinct perception. Evidently, this grace is not far off, almost within
reach of the souls which, from the tenor of their whole life, strive
to attain it. They have closed themselves off on the earthly side,
therefore, these can no longer look or breathe otherwise than
heavenward.

At the end of the eighteenth century, the monastic institution no longer
produced this effect; deformed, weakened and discredited through
its abuses, especially in the convents of males, and then violently
overthrown by the Revolution, it seemed to be dead. But, at the
beginning of the nineteenth century, behold it springing up again
spontaneously, in one direct, new, strong and active jet and higher than
the old one, free of the excrescences, rottenness and parasites
which, under the ancient regime, disfigured and discolored it. No more
compulsory vows, no "frocked" younger sons "to make an elder," no girls
immured from infancy, kept in the convent throughout their youth, led
on, urged, and then driven into a corner and forced into the final
engagement on becoming of age; no more aristocratic institutions, no
Order of Malta and chapters of men or of women in which noble families
find careers and a receptacle for their supernumerary children. No more
of those false and counterfeit vocations the real motive of which was,
sometimes pride of race and the determination not to lose a social
standing, sometimes the animal attractions of physical comfort,
indolence and idlenes