supper.  About an hour of out-door exercise is taken every day, and a long walk once a week and on feast-days.  All of Thursday in each week and the more important feasts of the year are days of recreation, when silence need not be observed during the greater part of the day, and much relaxation is otherwise allowed.  All Fridays are days of total silence and special devotion.  The letter fails to mention the discipline, or flagellation, which was taken twice a week.

He ends thus:  “The time of the novitiate is one year, and its object is to prove our vocation, and form the religious character—­the heart.  The exercises may seem too many to you, but to us they are quite otherwise.  Their frequent changes prevent them from being monotonous, and their variety makes them agreeable.  Our time passes without our taking count of it, and our joy is that of a pure conscience, and our happiness that of a clean heart.”

It might seem a matter of peculiar difficulty for a free nature like Isaac Hecker’s to conform to the stiff rules of such a system.  But this was not the case, and a closer look into the matter shows that such a regimen is of much use to an earnest man, however free his character, at the outset of his spiritual career.  Experience proves that one test of the genuineness of the interior disposition to serve God perfectly is readiness to surrender exterior peculiarities.  There is nothing in the special graces of God which should hinder a placid acceptance of the routine of a novitiate.  The merging of individual conduct into the common custom is the contribution which community life must exact from every member.  If a man is to be a hermit he may act from individual impulses alone, though, even so, rarely without counsel.  But if one would live and work with others, special graces and individual traits of character must not be allowed to interfere with a certain degree of uniformity.  On the other hand, that uniformity should not be allowed to cripple the spontaneous action of natural independence, and the inspiration of graces which are personal.

It must be granted that with many souls a novitiate will tend to a routine use of religious aids.  Yet it cannot be denied that its discipline forcibly concentrates the scattered purposes of life into one powerful stream.  It contributes to symmetry of character.  It furnishes efficacious tests of sincerity.  It drills disorderly natures into regularity.  It acquaints the beginner with the literature of his holy profession, and herein it is of priceless worth.  And finally, it provides advisers of approved wisdom during the period of the spiritual life when counsel is most needed, as well as most gratefully accepted.  But if it fails in each of these particulars, as no doubt it sometimes does, the novitiate may be said never to fail in detecting an inaptitude for the common life, if such exists; that is to say, a serious lack of the qualities which fit one to get along in peace with the brethren.