No more over-wealthy superiors, usufructuaries of a vast abbatial revenue, suzerain and landlord seigniors, with the train, luxury and customs of their condition, with four-horse carriages, liveries, officials, antechamber, court, chancellorship and ministers of justice, obliging their monks to address them as "my lord," as lax as any ordinary layman, well fitted to cause scandal in their order by their liberties and to set an example of depravity.

No more lay intrusions, commendatory abbes or priors, interlopers, and imposed from above; no more legislative and administrative interferences[5306] in order to bind monks and nuns down to their vows, to disqualify them and deprive them almost of citizenship, to exclude them from common rights, to withhold from them rights of inheritance and testamentary rights, from receiving or making donations, depriving them in advance of the means of subsistence, to confine them by force in their convents and set the patrol on their track, and, on trying to escape, to furnish their superior with secular help and keep down insubordination by physical constraint.

Nothing of this subsists after the great destruction of 1790.

Under the modern regime, if any one enters and remains in a convent it is because the convent is more agreeable to him than the world outside; there is no other motive no pressure or hindrance of an inferior or different kind, no direct or indirect, no domestic or legal constraint, no ambition, vanity and innate or acquired indolence, no certainty of finding satisfaction for a coarse and concentrated sensuality.

That which now operates is the awakened and persistent vocation; the man or the woman who takes vows and keeps them, enters upon and adheres to his or her engagement only through a spontaneous act deliberately and constantly renewed through their own free will.
Thus purified, the monastic institution recovers its normal form, which is the republican and democratic form, while the impracticable Utopia which the philosophers of the eighteenth century wanted to impose on lay society now becomes the effective regime under which the religious communities are going to live.