It is, however, only a way to perfection, and not perfection itself. The evangelical counsels, as St. Thomas explains, are “certain instruments for the attainment of perfection.”[6] They are nothing but specially suitable means for maintaining and deepening that unselfish, holy love, which St. Paul celebrates in his First Epistle to the Corinthians (Chap. xiii), and which constitutes the essence of holiness and of the Christian character. If this love be not present and alive, then the religious life is being violated in its profoundest meaning. St. Paul’s words would then apply: “If I should distribute all my goods to feed the poor … and have not charity, it profiteth me nothing” (1 Cor. xiii, 3). Monasteries are meant to be homes of love, shrines of the Holy Spirit, schools of the following of Christ. All their asceticism, all their vows and rules, aim only at the one thing necessary and seek to form the man of the new love, the man whose life is wholly love of God and his neighbor.