hreatens
him dashes headlong over a precipice, and to shun one death for a
moment rushes to another, I knowingly sought this new danger in
order to escape from the former one. And there, amid the dreadful
roar of the waves of the sea, where the land's end left me no
further refuge in flight, often in my prayers did I repeat over and
over again: "From the end of the earth will I cry unto Thee, when
my heart is overwhelmed" (Ps. lxi, 2).

No one, methinks, could fail to understand how persistently that
undisciplined body of monks, the direction of which I had thus
undertaken, tortured my heart day and night, or how constantly I
was compelled to think of the danger alike to my body and to my
soul. I held it for certain that if I should try to force them to
live according to the principles they had themselves professed, I
should not survive. And yet, if I did not do this to the utmost of
my ability, I saw that my damnation was assured. Moreover, a
certain lord who was exceedingly powerful in that region had some
time previously brought the abbey under his control, taking
advantage of the state of disorder within the monastery to seize
all the lands adjacent thereto for his own use, and he ground down
the monks with taxes heavier than those which were extorted from
the Jews themselves.

The monks pressed me to supply them with their daily necessities,
but they held no property in common which I might administer in
their behalf, and each one, with such resources as he possessed,
supported himself and his concubines, as well as his sons and
daughters. They took delight in harassing me on this matter, and
they stole and carried off whatsoever they could lay their hands
on, to the end that my failure to maintain order might make me
either give up trying to enforce discipline or else abandon my post
altogether. Since the entire region was equally savage, lawless and
disorganized, there was not a single man to whom I could turn for
aid, for the habits of all alike were foreign to me. Outside the
monastery the lord and his henchmen ceaselessly hounded me, and
within its walls the brethren were forever plotting against me, so
that it seemed as if the Apostle had had me and none other in mind
when he said: "Without were fightings, within were fears" (II Cor. vii, 5).

I considered and lamented the uselessness and the wretchedness of
my existence, how fruitless my life now was, both to myself and to
others; how of old I had been