Time passed on, and as the world grew worse, so the abbot grew more lonely.  Lonely and unsupported, he was unequal to the last effort of repentance, but he slowly strengthened himself for the trial.  As Lent came on, the season brought with it a more special call to effort, which he did not fail to recognize.  The conduct of the fraternity sorely disturbed him.  They preached against all which he most loved and valued, in language purposely coarse; and the mild sweetness of the rebukes which he administered, showed plainly on which side lay, in the abbey of Woburn, the larger portion of the spirit of his Master and theirs.  Now, when the passions of those times have died away, and we can look back with more indifferent eyes, how touching is the following.  There was one Sir William, curate of Woburn chapel, whose tongue, it seems, was rough beyond the rest.  The abbot met him one day, and spoke to him.  “Sir William,” he said, “I hear tell ye be a great railer.  I marvel that ye rail so.  I pray you teach my cure the scripture of God, and that may be to edification.  I pray you leave such railing.  Ye call the pope a bear and a banson.  Either he is a good man or an ill.  Domino suo stat aut cadit.  The office of a bishop is honourable.  What edifying is this to rail?  Let him alone.”

But they would not let him alone, nor would they let the abbot alone.  He grew “somewhat acrased,” they said, vexed with feelings of which they had no experience.  He fell sick, sorrow and the Lent discipline weighing upon him.  The brethren went to see him in his room, Brother Dan Woburn among the rest, who said that he asked him how he did, and received for answer, “I would that I had died with the good men that died for holding with the pope.  My conscience, my conscience doth grudge me every day for it.”  Life was fast losing its value for him.  What was life to him or any man when bought with a sin against his soul?  “If he be disposed to die, for that matter,” the insolent Croxton said, “he may die as soon as he will.”

All Lent he fasted and prayed; and his illness grew upon him; and at length in Passion week he thought all was over, and that he was going away.  On Passion Sunday he called the brethren about him, and as they stood round his bed, with their cold, hard eyes, “he exhorted them all to charity,” he implored them “never to consent to go out of their monastery; and if it chanced them to be put from it, they should in no wise forsake their habit.”  After these words, “being in a great agony, he rose out of his bed, and cried out and said, ’I would to God, it would please him to take me out of this wretched world; and I would I had died with the good men that have suffered death heretofore, for they were quickly out of their pain.’” * Then, half wandering, he began to mutter to himself aloud the thoughts which had been working in him in his struggles; and quoting St. Bernard’s words about the pope, he exclaimed, “Tu quis es.  Primatu Abel, gubernatione Noah, auctoritate Moses, judicatu Samuel potestate Petrus, unctione Christus.  Aliae ecclesiae habent super se pastores.  Tu pastor pastorum es.” ____