Crooked Vows by John Watt Page B

of God working powerfully in his heart, he resolved to renounce for ever what was a source of so great evil among men. He retired to a monastery, called Flavinia, three miles from Mutalasca, and the abbot received him with open arms, and took great care to see him instructed in the science of the saints, and in the rules of a monastic profession.
    His uncles, blinded by avarice and mutual animosity, were some years without opening their eyes; but at last, ashamed of their conduct towards a nephew, they agreed to take him out of his monastery, restore him to his estate, and persuade him to marry. In vain they applied all means to gain their point. Sabas had tasted the bitterness of the world, and the sweetness of the yoke of Christ, and his heart was so united to God, that nothing could draw him from his good purpose.
    He applied himself with great fervour to the practice of all virtues, especially humility, mortification and prayer, as the means to attain all others. One day, whilst he was working in the garden, he saw a tree loaded with fair and beautiful apples, and gathered one with an intention to eat it. But reflecting that this was a temptation of the devil, he threw the apple on the ground, and trod upon it. Moreover, to punish himself, and more perfectly to overcome the enemy, he made a vow never to eat any apples as long as he lived.
    Thomas pauses, glancing up from the page. Macpherson, apparently jotting a comment in his notebook with a puzzled expression about his eyes, notices the pause and the glance.
    â€˜Now don’t attend to me. I’m listening, never fear. Just focus on the story. And on whatever it brings back to you.’
    Thomas goes on.
    By this victory over himself he made great progress in all other virtues, exercising himself by day in labour, accompanied by prayer, and by night in watching in devotions, always fleeing idleness as the root of all evils, sleeping only as much as was absolutely necessary to support nature, and never interrupting his labours but to lift up his hands to God.
    When Sabas had been ten years in this monastery, being eighteen years old, with the leave of his abbot, he went to Jerusalem to visit the holy places, and to edify himself by the examples of the eminent solitaries of that country. He passed the winter in the monastery of Passarion, governed at that time by the holy abbot Elpidius. All the brethren were charmed with his virtue, and desired earnestly that he should fix his abode among them; but his great love of silence and retirement made him prefer the manner of life practised by Saint Euthymius. He cast himself at the feet of that holy abbot, conjuring him with many tears to receive him among his disciples.
    When he was thirty years of age he obtained leave of Saint Euthymius to spend five days a-week in a remote cave, which time he passed, without eating anything, in prayer and manual labour. He left his monastery on Sunday evening, carrying with him palm-twigs, and came back on Saturday morning with fifty baskets which he had made, imposing upon himself a task of ten a-day. Thus he had lived five years, till Saint Euthymius chose him and one Domitian for his companions in his great yearly retreat in the deserts of Rouban, in which Christ is said to have performed his forty days’ fast.
    They entered the solitude together on the 14th January, and returned to their monastery on Palm Sunday. In the first retreat Sabas fell down in the wilderness, almost dead from thirst. Saint Euthymius, moved by compassion, addressed a prayer to Christ, that he would take pity on his young fervent soldier, and, striking his staff into the earth, a spring gushed forth; of which Sabas, drinking a little, recovered his strength so as to be enabled to bear the fatigues of his retreat.
    Macpherson intervenes.
    'No doubt there is more, but we might leave the story here.’
    Thomas closes the book and lays it on the bulky leather-covered armrest of the chair. The