sherry, and followed by two or three glasses of excellent port—sometimes even champagne. The restriction to fish is not felt very acutely, either, in Killarney, where the lakes produce magnificent salmon, and where, by a most ingenious process of theological reasoning, water-fowl are included under the title of fish.
At the same time the monotony was equally disturbed by the occurrence of the fasts. Besides the ordinary fasts of the Church, the friars observe several which are peculiar to their rule, especially a long fast from the first of November until Christmas. However, there are few who really fast—that is, content themselves with one full meal per day—in this degenerate age, even in monasteries; abstinence from flesh-meat is the usual limit of their mortification. On the Continent, fasting, in the strict sense of the word, is much more frequently practised in monasteries, but an intensification of their usual idleness is the necessary consequence; in England, it is to the credit of the monks, and clergy generally, that they prefer industry to fasting, though it is hardly to their credit that they still make a profession of fasting. The Passionists are the only English congregation who cling to the practice with any fidelity, and their statistics of premature mortality are an eloquent commentary on the stupidity of the Italian authorities who are responsible for it.
And even the ‘fasting’ of modern times departs
