BTOr.EAl'IIUAL SKK'IVH. XXIX 



of St. Siilpif'O, to ('i)joy one year — tlie last year, as it proved — (jf 

 that domestic happiness from Avhich Ids academic and monastic 

 engagements have sequestered liim ahiiost all his life, but of the 

 sweetness of which many of those discourses of his that were 

 conceived in the loneliness of his convent-cell, show so tender and 

 most human an appreciation. His tliought was, in the repose of 

 liome, to ripen, by a few mouths of rellection, the fruits of so 

 many years of uninterniitted and laborious study. 



At the beginning of 1859, his resolution was taken to enter the 

 Order of the Barefooted Carmelite Friars; and in March of that 

 year he was admitted into the Novitiate of Broussey, near Bor- 

 deaux. 



That his decision to adopt the monastic life was dictated by no 

 sliallow or frivolous sentiment, and no w^orldly calculation, is 

 clearly enough proved by the choice which he made of an Order. 

 The original Order of Carmelites was one of the most austere in 

 its discii)line of all the mendicant orders of the Roman Church. 

 But in the sixteenth century, that remarkable enthusiast and vi- 

 sionary, Saint Theresa, found that the ascetic practices which it 

 required, under the " mitigated observance " allowed b}^ sundry 

 papal dispensations, were quite inadequate to satisfy the cravings 

 of her soul for expiatory macerations and mystical meditations. 

 In cooperation with a Carmelite friar, like-minded with herself, 

 named John of the Cross, she instituted several religious houses, 

 both monasteries and nunneries, in which the discipline was 

 restored to the most rigid iTile of the early days of hermitage. In 

 her autobiography she speaks with special delight of the fidelity 

 with which the monks of her first convent travelled about bare- 

 footed in the snow from village to village. At a later day, the 

 rule of the order w^as so far mitigated as to allow a sandal, to pro- 

 tect the sole of the foot. But from this interdict of shoes and 

 stockings, St. Theresa's reformed branch of the Carmelites took 

 its name of The Discalceate, or Barefooted Friars. The monks 

 are allowed no beds, but sleep on a board ; and even such sleep 

 as this is broken off every night at midnight by the summons to 

 rise and say the midnight oflices. No fire is allowed, save in the 



