Spirituality for lay people had to be considered out of the question. There were just too many obstacles, and the biggest of them all was precisely this thing called “the world.” The world is large, noisy, confusing, full of distractions and temptations. Consequently, as a factor in the life of a Christian layman, it had two, and only two, functions to perform: first, as a place where you learned to say no—where “doing good” was “avoiding evil”; second, as something to be avoided, shunned, fled from as much as possible, so that you could lead some kind of poor imitation of the monastic life in whatever scattered corners of time and circumstance you might snatch for the purpose. Is this the correct attitude to have?
