I must seek a lonelier waste in which I may be alone--quite alone with my God and myself.

There, perhaps I may find the way I seek, if indeed the fact that the creature that I call 'I,' in which the whole world with all its agitations in little finds room--and which will accompany me even there--does not once again frustrate all my labor.

He who takes his Self with him into the desert, is not alone." Paulus sighed deeply and then pursued his reflections: "How puffed up with pride I was after I had tasted the Gaul's rods in place of Hermas, and then I was like a drunken man who falls down stairs step by step.
And poor Stephanus too had a fall when he was so near the goal! He failed in strength to forgive, and the senator who has just now left me, and whose innocent son I had so badly hurt, when we parted forgivingly gave me his hand.

I could see that he did forgive me with all his heart, and this Petrus stands in the midst of life, and is busy early and late with mere worldly affairs." For a time he looked thoughtfully before him, and then he went on in his soliloquy, "What was the story that old Serapion used to tell?
In the Thebaid there dwelt a penitent who thought he led a perfectly saintly life and far transcended all his companions in stern virtue.

Once he dreamed that there was in Alexandria a man even more perfect than himself; Phabis was his name, and he was a shoemaker, dwelling in the White road near the harbor of Kibotos.