establish me in his own house, but my monastic regulations forbade it. Both through him and the other professors I have the kindest recollection of the university, from which, however, I was soon recalled.
A secondary object of my visit to Belgium was the opportunity it afforded of studying monastic life in all the tranquillity and fulness of development which it enjoys in a Catholic country. In England it was impossible to fulfil many of our obligations to the letter. It is a firm decree of a monastic order that the religious costume must never be laid aside: it is still decreed in English law that any person wearing a monastic habit in the public streets shall be imprisoned, and although the law has become a dead letter, experiment has shown the practice to be attended with grave inconveniences. The Franciscan constitutions strictly forbid collective or individual ownership, and even the mere physical contact of money: English law does not recognise the peculiar effects of a vow of poverty, and English railway companies and others are unwilling to accept a billet from a religious superior instead of the coin of the realm. But in a Roman Catholic country, at least in Belgium (for in France they are grievously tormented by the law), they have full liberty to translate their evangelical ideas into active life: I had heard that the Belgian province was a perfect model of monastic life, and, as I had vague dreams of helping F. David in his slowly maturing plan to reform our English houses, I desired to study it attentively.
