announcing that several of their best men had departed for the American missions) were likely to be starved into selling their principal house at Olton. Both these monastic bodies had the same manner of life as ourselves.
Other prominent orders, such as the Dominicans, Benedictines (who are settling in London since Manning’s death), and Carmelites, bear much the same relation to their primitive models. The unconscious tyranny of this heretical land prevents a literal observance of their true régime, and once the thin end of the wedge of corruption is in it penetrates very deeply. The modern friars have too much common sense and too much sense of humour to attempt a bodily revival of the thirteenth century with its antiquated asceticism and crude religious realism. In olden times every monastery had quite an armoury of spiked chains, bloody scourges, thigh bracelets, hair shirts, &c. In all my experience I have only seen one such instrument of self-torture; it was a thigh-bracelet, a broad wire chain, each link ending in a sharp inward point. It was dilapidated and rusty (not from the blood of victims but from the want of use), and excited as much interest and humorous comment in the party of monks who were examining it as a Spanish instrument of torture does in the Tower of London on a sober Protestant crowd. St. Aloysius, the great model of the Jesuits, was so modest in his relations with the dangerous sex, that he did not even
