If he does not possess every comfort, he has most of them, and thus, like a lay functionary, he may if he chooses get ahead in the world, obtain promotion to a better curacy, become irremovable, be appointed canon and sometimes mount upward, very high, to the topmost rank.

Society has a hold on him through all these worldly purposes; he is too much mixed up with it to detach himself from it entirely; very often his spiritual life droops or proves abortive under so many terrestrial preoccupations .-- If the Christian desires to arrive at the alibi and dwell in the life beyond, another system of existence is essential for him, entailing a protection against two temptations, that is to say the abandonment of two dangerous liberties, one consisting in the power by which, being an owner of property, he disposes as he likes of what belongs to him, and the other consisting in the power by which, being master of his acts, he arranges as he pleases his daily occupations.

To this end, in addition to the vow of chastity also taken by the secular priest, the members of religious orders also take two other distinct and precise vows.

By the vow of poverty he (or she) renounces all property whatever, at least that which is fully and completely his own,[5303] the arbitrary use of possessions, the enjoyment of what belongs to him personally, which vow leads him to live like a poor man, to endure privations, to labor, and beyond this, even to fasting, to mortifications, to counteracting and deadening in himself all those instincts by which man rebels against bodily suffering and aims at physical well being.

By the vow of obedience he (or she) gives himself up entirely to a double authority: one, in writing, which is discipline, and the other a living being, consisting of the superior whose business it is to interpret, apply and enforce the rule.