Nor had they come for the sake of wealth or luxury; the earnestness of newly-awakened, and in some degree persecuted, religion was upon them, and they regarded a sufficiency of food and clothing as all that they had a right to seek.

Indeed, the spirit of ascetiscism was one of their foremost characteristics.

Eliot was a man who lived in constant self-restraint as to both sleep and diet, and, on all occasions of special prayer, prefaced them by a rigorous fast--and he seems to have been in a continual atmosphere of devotion.
One of his friends objected (oddly enough as it seems to us) to his stooping to pick up a weed in his garden.

"Sir, you tell us we must be heavenly-minded." "It is true," he said, "and this is no impediment unto that; for, were I sure to go to heaven to-morrow, I would do what I do to-day." And, like many a good Christian, his outward life was to him full of allegory.

Going up the steep hill to his church, he said, "This is very like the way to heaven.