All through his sixteen years as Provincial, Father Bede strongly held that discipline has no value after childhood unless it is self-discipline. He abhorred coercive and nagging methods of enforcing it. Under his rule the best had every incentive to do their best, and the worst all the freedom that God allows them to do their worst. He was eminently loyal to our Lord’s counsel not to resist evil but to overwhelm it with good. Like his Master he acknowledged openly that religion is the happiest hunting-ground of Pharisees and profiteers, and he never concealed his indignation when he saw one man’s evil hindering another man’s good; but his remedy was to exhort the good to suffer the evil, and so convert it—if haply it would be converted—to like goodness. He had a firm faith in the moral of the Beatitudes—that to the meek and persecuted alone is given all power in heaven and on earth to conquer the froward tyrant. He well knew that when any ruler makes this foolishness of the Cross his only instrument of government, scandals needs must come. He had to brave the saddening experience of more than one. But he was worried neither by them nor by the mistakes and failures to which his leniency might expose himself and others. Only the grace of God, he believed, could save the Province from disaster under his rule; but he confidently counted on that grace, neglecting none of the appointed ways and means of meriting it.