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Updated: October 23, 2025
Religion at Rome is to kiss a crucifix; religion at Rome is to climb Pilate's stairs; religion at Rome is to repeat by rote a certain number of prayers before some beautiful painting or statue; or to remain a certain number of hours on one's bare knees on the paved floor; or to wear a hair-shirt.
This time Private Mucklewame leads the field, and decapitates a dandelion. The third time he has learned wisdom, and the beggar in the boat gets the bullet where all mocking foes should get it in the neck! Snap-shooting over, the combatants retire to the five-hundred-yards firing-point, taking with them that modern hair-shirt, the telephone.
She encouraged her imagination to brood over Clara, and invested her designedly with romantic charms, in spite of pain; the ascetic zealot hugs his share of Heaven most bitter, most blessed in his hair-shirt and scourge, and Laetitia's happiness was to glorify Clara.
As soon as he was there, without waiting for his father to make his demand, and without saying anything himself, he gave up what money he still had, and then stripped off his clothes, even to his shirt, under which it was seen that he wore a hair-shirt, and gave them up to his father, addressing him in the following beautiful words: "Until this time I have called thee father on earth; but from henceforward I may boldly say, Our Father who art in Heaven, in whom I have placed all my treasure, and all my confidence."
During all seasons of the year they dress in a heavy coarse habit, wear sandals on their feet, never make use of linen, are seldom seen in the parlor, sleep on a hard mattress, rise simultaneously, to chant the Divine Office, spend at least two hours each night at prayer, and are familiar with the use of the discipline, hair-shirt, etc. In a word, their mortifications are continual and rigorous.
Flagellation, indeed, as well as the custom of wearing the hair-shirt, so common with the monks, and even with religious lay catholics, was, by the stimulus it imparted to the skin, and hence to the internal viscera, much more likely to increase the energy of the physiological functions, and thus excite the commission of the very acts they are intended to suppress.
Leaving, however, for the present, the meaning of monastic asceticism, it seems necessary to insist that there really was such a thing; there is no doubt about it. If the particular actions told of each saint are not literally true, as belonging to him, abundance of men did for many centuries lead the sort of life which saints are said to have led. We have got a notion that the friars were a snug, comfortable set, after all; and the life in a monastery pretty much like that in a modern university, where the old monks' language and affectation of unworldliness does somehow contrive to co-exist with as large a mass of bodily enjoyment as man's nature can well appropriate. Very likely this was the state into which many of the monasteries had fallen in the fifteenth century. It was a symptom of a very rapid disorder which had set in among them, and which promptly terminated in dissolution. But long, long ages lay behind the fifteenth century, in which, wisely or foolishly, these old monks and hermits did make themselves a very hard life of it; and the legend only exceeded the reality in being a very slightly idealised portrait. We are not speaking of the miracles; that is a wholly different question. When men knew little of the order of nature, whatever came to pass without an obvious cause was at once set down to influences beyond nature and above it; and so long as there were witches and enchanters, strong with the help of the bad powers, of course the especial servants of God would not be left without graces to outmatch and overcome the devil. And there were many other reasons why the saints should work miracles. They had done so under the old dispensation, and there was no obvious reason why Christians should be worse off than Jews. And again, although it be true, in the modern phrase, which is beginning to savour a little of cant, that the highest natural is the highest supernatural, nevertheless natural facts permit us to be so easily familiar with them, that they have an air of commonness; and when we have a vast idea to express, there is always a disposition to the extraordinary. But the miracles are not the chief thing; nor ever were they so. Men did not become saints by working miracles, but they worked miracles because they had become saints; and the instructiveness and value of their lives lay in the means which they had used to make themselves what they were: and as we said, in this part of the business there is unquestionable basis of truth scarcely even exaggeration. We have documentary evidence, which has been filtered through the sharp ordeal of party hatred, of the way in which some men (and those, not mere ignorant fanatics, but men of vast mind and vast influence in their days) conducted themselves, where myth has no room to enter. We know something of the hair-shirt of Thomas
Under her own costly dresses, which her situation in society obliged her to wear, she constantly had a hair-shirt; and she cleverly refused a proposal of marriage which her parents wished her to accept, recommending to God her virginity, which she intended to preserve in entire purity.
He exhorted her urgently to repent and pressed her to wear a hair-shirt next her skin, an incomparable remedy against naughty cravings and a sovran medicine for natures over prone to the sins of the flesh. She besought him: "Good Brother, never ask too much of me." But he would not hearken, and threatened her with the pains of hell if she did not amend her ways.
The subjection of women; the ideal imposed upon them from the cradle, and worn, like a hair-shirt, with so much constancy; their motherly, superior tenderness to man's vanity and self-importance; their managing arts the arts of a civilised slave among good-natured barbarians are all painful ingredients and all help to falsify relations.
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