of the Carmelites which Teresa de Jesus undertook
was a Spanish work. Yes, Spanish it was, and in it men sought liberty.

It was, in fact, the yearning for liberty, for inward liberty, which, in
the troubled days of the Inquisition, led many choice spirits to the
cloister. They imprisoned themselves in order that they might be more
free. "Is it not a fine thing that a poor nun of San Jose can attain to
sovereignty over the whole earth and the elements?" said St. Teresa in
her _Life_. It was the Pauline yearning for liberty, the longing to
shake off the bondage of the external law, which was then very severe,
and, as Maestro Fray Luis de Leon said, very stubborn.

But did they actually find liberty in the cloister? It is very doubtful
if they did, and to-day it is impossible. For true liberty is not to rid
oneself of the external law; liberty is consciousness of the law. Not he
who has shaken off the yoke of the law is free, but he who has made
himself master of the law. Liberty must be sought in the midst of the
world, which is the domain of the law, and of sin, the offspring of the
law. That which we must be freed from is sin, which is collective.

Instead of renouncing the world in order that we may dominate it--and
who does not know the collective instinct of domination of those
religious Orders whose members renounce the world?--what we ought to do
is to dominate the world in order that we may be able to renounce it.
Not to seek poverty and submission, but to seek wealth in order that we
may use it to increase human consciousness, and to seek power for the
same end.

It is curious that monks and anarchists should be at enmity with each
other, when fundamentally they both profess the same ethic and are
related by close ties of kinship. Anarchism tends to become a kind of
atheistic monachism and a religious, rather than an ethical or
economico-social, doctrine. The one party starts from the assumption
that man is naturally evil, born in original sin, and that it is through
grace that he becomes good, if indeed he ever does become good; and the
other from the assumption that man is naturally good and is subsequently
perverted by society. And these two theories really amount to the same
thing, for in both the individual is opposed to society, as if the
individual had preceded society and therefore were destined to survive
it. And both ethics are ethics of the cloister.

And the fact that guilt is collective must no