y of judgment, provided she might
always have matter for suffering for God; but that to live a single day
without suffering would be intolerable. She said again that she was
devoured with two unassuageable fevers, one for the holy communion, the
other for suffering, humiliation, and annihilation. 'Nothing but
pain,' she continually said in her letters, 'makes my life
supportable.'"[185]

[185] Bougaud: Hist de la bienheureuse Marguerite Marie, Paris, 1894,
pp. 265, 171. Compare, also, pp. 386, 387.

So much for the phenomena to which the ascetic impulse will in certain
persons give rise. In the ecclesiastically consecrated character three
minor branches of self-mortification have been recognized as
indispensable pathways to perfection. I refer to the chastity,
obedience, and poverty which the monk vows to observe; and upon the
heads of obedience and poverty I will make a few remarks.

First, of Obedience. The secular life of our twentieth century opens
with this virtue held in no high esteem. The duty of the individual to
determine his own conduct and profit or suffer by the consequences
seems, on the contrary, to be one of our best rooted contemporary
Protestant social ideals. So much so that it is difficult even
imaginatively to comprehend how men possessed of an inner life of their
own could ever have come to think the subjection of its will to that of
other finite creatures recommendable. I confess that to myself it
seems something of a mystery. Yet it evidently corresponds to a
profound interior need of many persons, and we must do our best to
understand it.

On the lowest possible plane, one sees how the expediency of obedience
in a firm ecclesiastical organization must have led to its being viewed
as meritorious. Next, experience shows that there are times in every
one's life when one can be better counseled by others than by one's
self. Inability to decide is one of the commonest symptoms of fatigued
nerves; friends who see our troubles more broadly, often see them more
wisely than we do; so it is frequently an act of excellent virtue to
consult and obey a doctor, a partner, or a wife. But, leaving these
lower prudential regions, we find, in the nature of some of the
spiritual excitements which we have been studying, good reasons for
idealizing obedience. Obedience may spring from the general religious
phenomenon of inner softening and self-surrender and throwing one's
self on higher powers.