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It was in those kinds of temptation now that he found his warfare to lie; internal assaults so fierce that it was terribly difficult to know whether he had yielded or not, sudden images of pride and anger and lust that presented themselves so vividly and attractively that it seemed he must have willed them; it was not often that he was tempted to sin in word or deed—­such, when they came, rushed on him suddenly; but in the realm of thought and imagination and motive he would often find himself, as it were, entering a swarm of such things, that hovered round him, impeding his prayer, blinding his insight, and seeking to sting the very heart of his spiritual life.  Then once more he would fight himself free by despising and rejecting them, or would emerge without conscious will of his own into clearness and serenity.

But as he looked back he regretted nothing.  It was true that the warfare was more subtle and internal, but it was more honourable too; for to conquer a motive or tame an imagination was at once more arduous and more far-reaching in its effects than a victory in merely outward matters, and he seldom failed to thank God half-a-dozen times a day for having given him the vocation of a monk.

There was one danger, however, that he did not realise, and his confessor failed to point it out to him; and that was the danger of the wrong kind of detachment.  As has been already seen the theory of the Religious Life was that men sought it not merely for the salvation of their own souls, but for that of the world.  A monastery was a place where in a special sense the spiritual commerce of the world was carried on:  as a workman’s shed is the place deputed and used by the world for the manufacture of certain articles.  It was the manufactory of grace where skilled persons were at work, busy at a task of prayer and sacrament which was to be at other men’s service.  If the father of a family had a piece of spiritual work to be done, he went to the monastery and arranged for it, and paid a fee for the sustenance of those he employed, as he might go to a merchant’s to order a cargo and settle for its delivery.

Since this was so then, it was necessary that the spiritual workmen should be in a certain touch with those for whom they worked.  It was true that they must be out of the world, undominated by its principles and out of love with its spirit; but in another sense they must live in its heart.  To use another analogy they were as windmills, lifted up from the earth into the high airs of grace, but their base must be on the ground or their labour would be ill-spent.  They must be mystically one with the world that they had resigned.

Chris forgot this; and laboured, and to a large extent succeeded, in detaching himself wholly; and symptoms of this mistake showed themselves in such things as tending to despise secular life, feeling impatient with the poor to whom he had to minister, in sneering in his heart at least at anxious fussy men who came to arrange for masses, at troublesome women who haunted the sacristy door in a passion of elaborateness, and at comfortable families who stamped into high mass and filled a seat and a half, but who had yet their spiritual burdens and their claims to honour.