210 EARLY REMINISCENCES limit such to those who would enter into Religious Orders that do practical works of utility, education, nursing and the like ; but I cannot admit that there is any call of God to men or women to enter on a course of life that renders them useless. Such calls are from disordered livers. Mr. Ambrose Lisle Phillipps founded a Cistercian House near Grace Dieu in Leicestershire in a very picturesque situation. One day a small Leeds tradesman, who was staying in the neighbourhood, visited th°. abbey. He was so impressed, so overawed with the life he saw there lived by the monks, that he returned to Leeds, sold his shop—a grocery, I believe—came to S. Bernard's and offered himself as a novice. Whether he remained there and took lifelong vows I cannot say. I heard of him from a muffin man at Horbury, who also had been in the abbey but had quitted it. Phillipps was desirous to have everything very mediaeval in the surroundings, and he established a poor man in his park as a hermit in a cell. On a certain day when Phillipps was taking a party of enthusiasts over his monastery and had shown them the white-habited monks at work in the fields, he conducted them to the hermit's cell—but to his surprise found the man gone. Mr. Phillipps inquired of the park-keeper at the lodge as to what had become of the hermit. " Please, your honour, he hasn't had his beer for three days, and he couldn't stand it no longer, and is gone," replied the man. I entertain a strong conviction that this runaway anchorite became an assistant to me when I was curate of Horbury, and that he taught in the night school. At that time, he was by profession a muffin-man. I am inclined to wonder where on earth I should have been, spiritually, religiously, had I not been born and bred in the Church of England. There is so much that to me is repellent in the Roman Communion, such an indifference to truth, in the matter of toleration of what are lies ; so much superabundance of ceremonial, and so much suppression of reason, that I never could have been happy in that part of the Church. As to Lutheran Protestantism and Calvinism, I could not away with either. There is one of Mrs .Alfred Gatty's Fables relative to the crickets that has often occurred to me. She tells how desolate they were when men lived in tents or in caves, and it was not till human beings
