Here special personalities may find the only existence that suits them.

If devout or laborious, not only do these afford an outlet for the deeper needs of conscience, of the imagination, of activity, and of discipline, but also they serve as dikes which restrain and direct them in a channel which will lead to the creation of a masterpiece of infinite value.

In this way thousands of men and women fulfill at small cost, voluntarily and gratis, and with great effect, the least attractive and more repulsive social needs, thus performing in human society the role which, inside the ant-hill, we see assigned to the sexless worker-ant.[2242] Thus, at bottom, the institution was really good, and if it had to be cauterized it was merely essential to remove the inert or corrupted parts and preserve the healthy and sound parts .-- Now, if we take only the monastic bodies, there were more than one-half of these entitled to respect.

I omit those monks, one-third of whom remained zealous and exemplary-the Benedictines, who continue the "Gallia Christiana," with others who, at sixty years of age, labor in rooms without a fire; the Trappists, who cultivate the ground with their own hands, and the innumerable monasteries which serve as educational seminaries, bureaus of charity, hospices for shelter, and of which all the villages in their neighborhood demand the conservation by the National Assembly.[2243] I have to mention the nuns, thirty-seven thousand in fifteen hundred convents.

Here, except in the twenty-five chapters of canonesses, which are a semi-worldly rendezvous for poor young girls of noble birth, fervor, frugality, and usefulness are almost everywhere incontestable.
One of the members of the Ecclesiastical Committee admits in the Assembly tribunal that, in all their letters and addresses, the nuns ask to be allowed to remain in their cloisters; their entreaties, in fact, are as earnest as they are affecting.[2244] One Community writes, "We should prefer the sacrifice of our lives to that of our calling.