mestic ties, and a life spent wholly in the contemplation of wisdom. The Egyptian philosophy, that soon after acquired an ascendency in Europe, anticipated still more closely the monastic ideal. On the outskirts of the Church, the many sects of Gnostics and Manicheans all held under different forms the essential evil of matter. The Docetæ, following the same notion, denied the reality of the body of Christ. The Montanists and the Novatians surpassed and stimulated the private penances of the orthodox. The soil was thus thoroughly prepared for a great outburst of asceticism, whenever the first seed was sown. This was done during the Decian persecution. Paul, the hermit, who fled to the desert during that persecution, is said to have been the first of the tribe.2 Antony, who speedily followed, greatly extended the movement, and in a few years the hermits had become a mighty nation. Persecution, which in the first instance drove great numbers as fugitives to the deserts, soon aroused a passionate religious enthusiasm that showed itself in an ardent desire for those sufferings which were believed to lead directly to heaven, and this enthusiasm, after the peace of Constantine, found its natural vent and sphere in the macerations of the desert life. The imaginations of men were fascinated by the poetic circumstances of that life which St. Jerome most eloquently embellished. Women were pre-eminent in recruiting for it. The same

1 On these penances, see Bingham, Antiq. book vii. Bingham, I think, justly divides the history of asceticism into three periods. During the first, which extends from the foundation of the Church to A.D. 250, there were men and women who, with a view of spiritual perfection, abstained from marriage, relinquished amusements, accustomed themselves to severe fasts, and gave up their property to works of charity; but did this in the middle of society and without leading the life of either a hermit or a monk. During the second period, which extended from the Decian persecution, anchorites were numerous, but the custom of a common or coenobitic life was unknown. It was originated in the time of Constantine by Pachomius. 2 This is expressly stated by St. Jerome (Vit. Pauli).

spirit that had formerly led the wife of the Pagan official to entertain secret relations with the Christian priests, now led the wife of the Christian to become the active agent of the monks. While the father designed his son for the army, or for some civil post, the mother was often straining every nerve to induce him to become a hermit; the monks secretly corresponded with her, they skilfully assumed the functions of education, in order that they might influence the young; and sometimes, to evade the precautions or the anger of the father, they concealed their profession, and assumed the garb of lay pedagogues.1 The pulpit, which had almost superseded, and immeasurably transcended in influence, the chairs of the rhetoricians, and which was filled by such men as Ambrose, Augustine, Chrysostom, Basil, and the Gregòries, was continually exerted in the same cause, and the extreme luxury of the great cities produced a violent, but not unnatural, reaction of asceticism. The dignity of the monastic position, which sometimes brought men who had been simple peasants into connection with the emperors, the security it furnished to fugitive slaves and criminals, the desire of escaping from those fiscal burdens which, in the corrupt and oppressive administration of the empire, had acquired an intolerable weight, and especially the barbarian invasions, which produced every variety of panic and wretchedness, conspired with the new religious teaching in peopling the desert. A theology of asceticism was speedily formed. The examples of Elijah and Elisha, to the first of whom, by a bold flight of the imagination, some later Carmelites ascribed the origin of their order, and the more recent instance of the

1 See on this subject some curious evidence in Neander's Life of Chrysostom. St. Chrysostom wrote a long work to console fathers whose sous were thus seduced to the desert.

Baptist were at once adduced. To an ordinary layman the life of the anchorite might appear in the highest degree opposed to that of the Teacher who began His mission in a marriage feast; who was continually reproached by His enemies for the readiness with which He mixed with the world, and who selected from the female sex some of His purest and most devoted followers; but the monkish theologians avoiding, for the most part, these topics, dilated chiefly on His immaculate birth, His virgin mother, His life of celibacy, His exhortation to the rich young man. The fact that St. Peter, to whom a general primacy was already ascribed, was unquestionably married, was a difficulty which was in a measure met by a tradition that he, as well as the other married apostles, abstained from intercourse with their wives after their conversion.' St. Paul, however, was probably unmarried, and his writings showed a decided preference for the unmarried state, which the ingenuity of theologians also discovered in some quarters where it might be least expected. Thus, St. Jerome assures us that when the clean animals entered the ark by sevens, and the unclean ones by pairs, the odd number typified the celibate, and the even the married condition. Even of the unclean animals but one pair of each kind was admitted, lest they should perpetrate the enormity of second marriage.2 Ecclesiastical tradition sustained the tendency, and the apostle James, as he has been portrayed by Hegesippus, became a kind of ideal saint, a faithful picture of what, according to the notions of theologians, was the true type of human nobility. He was converted,' it was said, 'from his mother's womb.' He drank neither wine nor fermented liquors, and abstained from animal

1 On this tradition see Champagny, Les Antonins, tome i. p. 193. 2 Ep. cxxiii.

food. A razor never came upon his head. He never anointed with oil, or used a bath. He alone was allowed to enter the sanctuary. He never wore woollen, but linen garments. He was in the habit of entering the temple alone, and was often found upon his bended knees, and interceding for the forgiveness of the people, so that his knees became as hard as a camel's.1

6

3

The progress of the monastic movement, as has been truly said, was not less rapid or universal than that of Christianity itself." Of the actual number of the anchorites, those who are acquainted with the extreme unveracity of the first historians of the movement will hesitate to speak with confidence. It is said that St. Pachomius, who early in the fourth century founded the cœnobitic mode of life, enlisted under his jurisdiction 7,000 monks; 3 that in the days of St. Jerome nearly 50,000 monks were sometimes assembled at the Easter festivals; that in the desert of Nitria alone there were, in the fourth century, 5,000 monks under a single abbot; 5 that an Egyptian city named Oxyrinchus devoted itself almost exclusively to the ascetic life, and included 20,000 virgins and 10,000 monks; that St. Serapion presided over 10,000 monks,7 and that, towards the close of the fourth century, the monastic population in that country was nearly equal to the population of the cities. Egypt was the parent of monachism, and it was there that it attained both its extreme development and its most austere severity; but there was very soon scarcely any Christian country in

1 Euseb. Eccl. Hist. ii. 23.

2 Gibbon, Decline and Fall, ch. xxxvii.; a brief but masterly sketch of the progress of the movement.

3 Palladius, Hist. Laus. xxxviii.

4 Jerome, Preface to the Rule of St. Pachomius, § 7.

5 Cassian, De Cœnob. Inst. iv. 1.

Rufinus, Hist. Monach. ch. v. 7 Palladius, Hist. Laus. lxxvi.

Rufinus visited it himself.

8 Rufinus, Hist. Mon. vii.

which a similar movement was not ardently propagated. St. Athanasius and St. Zeno are said to have introduced it into Italy,1 where it soon afterwards received a great stimulus from St. Jerome. St. Hilarion instituted the first monks in Palestine, and he lived to see many thousands subject to his rule, and towards the close of his life to plant monachism in Cyprus. Eustathius, Bishop of Sebastia, spread it through Armenia, Paphlagonia, and Pontus. St. Basil laboured along the wild shores of the Euxine. St. Martin of Tours founded the first monastery in Gaul, and 2,000 monks attended his funeral. Unrecorded missionaries planted the new institution in the heart of Ethiopia, amid the little islands that stud the Mediterranean, in the secluded valleys of Wales and Ireland.2 But even more wonderful than the many thousands who thus abandoned the world, is the reverence with which they were regarded by those who, by their attainments or their character, would seem most opposed to the monastic ideal. No one had more reason than Augustine to know the danger of enforced celibacy, but St. Augustine exerted all his energies to spread monasticism through his diocese. St. Ambrose, who was by nature an acute statesman; St. Jerome and St. Basil, who were ambitious scholars; St. Chrysostom, who was pre-eminently formed to sway the refined throngs of a metropolis, all exerted their powers in favour of the life of

There is a good deal of doubt and controversy about this. See a note in Mosheim's Eccl. Hist. (Soame's edition), vol. i. p. 354.

* Most of the passages remaining on the subject of the foundation of monachism are given by Thomassin, Discipline de l'Église, part i. livre iii. ch. xii. This work contains also much general information about monachism. A curious collection of statistics of the numbers of the monks in different localities, additional to those I have given and gleaned from the Lives of the Saints, may be found in Pitra (Vie de S. Léger, Introd. p. lix.) ; 2,100, or, according to another account, 3,000 monks, lived in the monastery of Banchor.