all the sisters who once peopled Sharon, sleep together
in the mold. But in the middle of the eighteenth century their bare
feet shuffled upon the stairs as, clad in white hooded cloaks
descending to the very ground, they glided in and out of the low doors,
or assembled in the little chapel called "Zion" to attend service under
the lead of their founder, Conrad Beissels. In the convent, where he
reigned supreme, Beissels was known as Brother Friedsam; later he was
reverently called Father Friedsam Gottrecht, a name that, like all
their convent names, had plenty of mystical significance attached to
it.

But monks and nuns are men and women; and neither cloister life, nor
capuchin hoods and cloaks, nor bare feet, nor protracted midnight
services, can prevent heartburnings and rivalries, nor can all of these
together put down--what is most to be dreaded in a monastery--the
growth of affection between man and woman. What could be done to tame
human nature into submission, to bring it to rejoice only in unearthly
meditations, and a contented round of self-denial and psalm-singing,
Brother Friedsam had tried on his followers with the unsparing hand of
a religious enthusiast. He had forbidden all animal food. Not only was
meat of evil tendency, but milk, he said, made the spirit heavy and
narrow; butter and cheese produced similar disabilities; eggs excited
the passions; honey made the eyes bright and the heart cheerful, but
did not clear the voice for music. So he approved chiefly of those
plain things that sprang direct from the earth, particularly of
potatoes, turnips, and other roots, with a little bread soup and such
like ghostly diet. For drink he would have nothing but what he called
"innocent clear water," just as it flowed from the spring.

But even a dish of potatoes and turnips and beets and carrots, eaten
from wooden trenchers, without milk or butter or meat, was not
sufficient to make the affections and passions of men and women as
ethereal as Friedsam wished. He wedded his people in mystic marriage to
"the Chaste Lamb," to borrow his frequent phrase. They sang
ecstatically of a mystical city of brotherly and sisterly affection
which they, in common with other dreamers of the time, called
Philadelphia, and they rejoiced in a divine creature called in their
mystical jargon _Sophia_, which I suppose meant wisdom, wisdom divorced
from common sense. These anchorites did not eschew social enjoyment,
but held little l