renewed the effort for my admission. I complied, after some hesitation, with an invitation to the monastery, and eventually it was arranged that I should be received as a pupil and aspirant to the monastic life. I had been conscious throughout of merely yielding to circumstances, to the advice and exhortation of my elders; there was no definite craving for the life on my part, certainly no ‘voice speaking within me’ to which I felt it a duty to submit. I do not, of course, mean to say that my subsequent profession was in any way a matter of constraint—once within the walls of the monastery my mind was seriously and deliberately formed (with whatever seriousness a boy of sixteen is capable of); I am merely describing the manner in which a religious ‘vocation’ is engendered. About the same time a Jesuit, the late F. Anderdon, S.J., made advances to me from another direction; and a third proposal was made to send me to the diocesan seminary to study for the secular clergy. There seem to have been no premonitory symptoms in my youthful conduct of the enfant terrible I was destined one day to become.
The ‘vocations’ of most of my fellow-students, and of my students in later years, were of a similar origin. They had either lived in the vicinity of a Franciscan convent or their parish had been visited by Franciscan missionaries. Already troubled with a vague desire for a sacerdotal career, the picturesque brown robe, the eventful life, and the commanding
