THE ABBOT'S TOWER On the morrow he rose earlier, talking the while with his servant Deodatus.

This good fellow continued to exhibit so deep an affection for the life of the monastery that Basil was at length moved to ask him whether, if he had the choice, he would veritably become a monk.
Deodatus looked at his master with eyes of pathetic earnestness, tried in vain to speak, and burst into tears.

Instructed by a vocation so manifest, Basil began to read more clearly in his own heart, where, in spite of the sorrows he had borne and of the troublous uncertainties that lay before him, he found no such readiness to quit the world.

He could approve the wisdom of those who renounced the flesh, to be rewarded with tranquillity on earth and eternal happiness hereafter; but his will did not ally itself with his intellect.

Moreover, was it certain, he asked himself, that all who embraced the religious life were so rewarded?
In turning the pages of Augustine's work, he had come upon a passage which arrested his eye and perturbed his thought, a passage which seemed clearly to intimate that the soul's eternal destiny had from the beginning of things been decided by God, some men being created for bliss, more for damnation.