for the board and lodging of this welcome guest.

Wessel's last years were happily spent. He was the acknowledged leader
of his society, and he divided his time between Mount St. Agnes and
the sisters at Groningen, with occasional visits to Adwert. There he
set about reviving the Abbey schools, one elementary, within its
walls, the other more advanced, in a village near by; and Abbot Rees
warmly supported him. Would-be pupils besought him to teach them Greek
and Hebrew. Admiring friends came to hear him talk, and brought their
sons to see this glory of their country--Lux mundi, as he was called.
Some fragments of his conversation have been preserved, the
unquestioned judgements which his hearers loyally received. Of the
Schoolmen he was contemptuous, with their honorific titles: 'doctor
angelic, doctor seraphic, doctor subtle, doctor irrefragable.' 'Was
Thomas (Aquinas) a doctor? So am I. Thomas scarcely knew Latin, and
that was his only tongue: I have a fair knowledge of the three
languages. Thomas saw Aristotle only as a phantom: I have read him in
Greece in his own words.' To Ostendorp, then a young man, but
afterwards to become head master of Deventer school, he gave the
counsel: 'Read the ancients, sacred and profane: modern doctors, with
their robes and distinctions, will soon be drummed out of town.' At
Mount St. Agnes once he was asked why he never used rosary nor book of
hours. 'I try', he replied, 'to pray always. I say the Lord's Prayer
once every day. Said once a year in the right spirit it would have
more weight than all these vain repetitions.'

He loved to read aloud to the brethren on Sunday evenings; his
favourite passage being John xiii-xviii, the discourse at the Last
Supper. As he grew older, he sometimes stumbled over his words. He was
not an imposing figure, with his eyes somewhat a-squint and his slight