which this spirit was carried, the life of St. Simeon Stylites is probably the most remarkable. It would be difficult to conceive a more horrible or disgusting picture than is given of the penances by which that saint commenced his ascetic career. He had bound a rope around him so that it became imbedded in his flesh, which putrefied around it. A horrible stench, intolerable to the bystanders, exhaled from his body, and worms dropped from him whenever he moved, and they filled his bed.' Sometimes he left the monastery and slept in a dry well, inhabited, it is said, by dæmons. He built successively three pillars, the last being sixty feet high, and scarcely two cubits in circumference, and on this pillar, during thirty years, he remained exposed to every change of climate, ceaselessly and rapidly bending his body in prayer almost to the level of his feet. A spectator attempted to number these rapid motions, but desisted from weariness when he had counted 1,244. For a whole year, we are told, St. Simeon stood upon one leg, the other being covered with hideous ulcers, while his biographer was commissioned to stand by his side, to pick up the worms that fell from his body, and to replace them in the sores, the saint saying to the worm, Eat what God has given you.' From every quarter pilgrims of every degree thronged to do him homage. A crowd of prelates followed him to the grave. A brilliant star is said to have shone miraculously over his pillar; the general voice of mankind pronounced him to be the highest model of a Christian saint, and several other anchorites imitated or emu- J lated his penances.1

6

There is, if I mistake not, no department of literature 7 the importance of which is more inadequately realised

See his Life by his disciple Antony, in the Vita Patrum, Evagrius, i. 13-14. Theodoret, Philotheus, cap. xxvi.

L

than the lives of the saints. Even where they have no direct historical value, they have a moral value of the very highest order. They may not tell us with accuracy what men did at particular epochs, but they display with the utmost vividness what they thought and felt, their measure of probability, and their ideal of excellence. Decrees of councils, elaborate treatises of theologians, creeds, liturgies, and canons, are all but the husks of religious history. They reveal what was professed and argued before the world, but not that which was realised in the imagination or enshrined in the heart. The history of art, which in its ruder day reflected with delicate fidelity the fleeting images of an anthropomorphic age, is in this respect invaluable; but still more important is that vast Christian mythology, which grew up spontaneously from the intellectual condition of the time, included all its dearest hopes, wishes, ideals, and imaginings, and constituted, during many centuries, the popular literature of Christendom. In the case of the saints of the deserts, there can be no question that the picture-which is drawn chiefly by eye-witnesses-however grotesque may be some of its details, is in its leading features historically true. It is true that self-torture was for some centuries regarded as the chief measure of human excellence, that tens of thousands of the most devoted men fled to the desert to reduce themselves by maceration nearly to the condition of the brute, and that this odious superstition had acquired an almost absolute ascendency in the ethics of the age. The examples of asceticism I have cited are but a few out of many hundreds, and volumes might be written, and have been written, detailing them. Till the reform of St. Benedict, the ideal was on the whole unchanged. The Western monks, from the conditions of their climate, were constitutionally in

capable of rivalling the abstinence of the Egyptian anchorites, but their conception of supreme excellence was much the same, and they laboured to compensate for their inferiority in penances by claiming some superiority in miracles. From the time of St. Pachomius, the cœnobitic life was adopted by most monks; but the Eastern monasteries, with the important exception of a vow of obedience, differed little from a collection of hermitages. They were in the deserts; the monks commonly lived in separate cells; they kept silence at their repasts; they rivalled one another in the extravagance of their penances. A few feeble efforts were indeed made by St. Jerome and others to moderate austerities which frequently led to insanity and suicide, to check the turbulence of certain wandering monks, who were accustomed to defy the ecclesiastical authorities, and especially to suppress monastic mendicancy, which had appeared prominently among some heretical sects. The orthodox monks commonly employed themselves in weaving mats of palm-leaves; but, living in the deserts, with no wants, they speedily sank into a listless apathy; and those who were most admired were those who, like Simeon Stylites and the hermit John, of whom I have already spoken, were most exclusively devoted to their superstition. Diversities of individual character were, however, vividly displayed. Many anchorites, without knowledge, passions, or imagination, having fled from servile toil to the calm of the wilderness, passed the long hours in sleep or in a mechanical routine of prayer, and their inert and languid existences, prolonged to the extreme of old age, closed at last by a tranquil and almost animal death. Others made. their cells by the clear fountains and clustering palm-trees of some oasis in the desert, and a blooming garden arose beneath their toil. The numerous monks who followed

St. Serapion devoted themselves largely to agriculture, and sent shiploads of corn for the benefit of the poor.1 Of one old hermit it is related, that such was the cheerfulness of his mind, that every sorrow was dispelled by his presence, and the weary and the heartbroken were consoled by a few words from his lips.2 More commonly, however, the hermit's cell was the scene of perpetual mournings. Tears and sobs, and frantic strugglings with imaginary dæmons, and paroxysms of religious despair, were the texture of his life, and the dread of spiritual enemies, and of that death which his superstition had rendered so terrible, embittered every hour of his existence. The solace of intellectual occupations was rarely resorted to. 'The duty,' said St. Jerome, of a monk is not to teach, but to weep.'4 A cultivated and disciplined mind was the least subject to those hallucinations, which were regarded as the highest evidence of Divine favour, and although in an age when

1 Palladius, Hist. Laus. lxxvi. 2 Rufinus, Hist. Monach. xxxiii.

3 We have a striking illustration of this in St. Arsenius. His eyelashes are said to have fallen off through continual weeping, and he had always, when at work, to put a cloth on his breast to receive his tears. As he felt his death approaching, his terror rose to the point of agony. The monks who were about him said, ""Quid fles, pater? numquid et tu times?" Ille respondit, "In veritate timeo et iste timor qui nunc mecum est, semper in me fuit, ex quo factus sum monachus." — Verba Seniorum, Prol. § 163. It was said of St. Abraham that no day passed after his conversion without his shedding tears. (Vit. Patrum.) St. John the dwarf once saw a monk laughing immoderately at dinner, and was so horrified that he at once began to cry. (Tillemont, Mém. de l'Hist. ecclés. tome x. p. 430.) St. Basil (Regulæ, interrog. xvii.) gives a remarkable disquisition on the wickedness of laughing, and he observes that this was the one bodily affection which Christ does not seem to have known. Mr. Buckle has collected a series of passages to precisely the same effect from the writings of the Scotch divines. (Hist. of Civilisation, vol. ii. pp. 385-386.)

4 Monachus autem non doctoris habet sed plangentis officium.' Contr. Vigilant. xv.

5 As Tillemont puts it: 'Il se trouva très-peu de saints en qui Dieu ait joint les talens extérieurs de l'éloquence et de la science avec la grâce de

the passion for asceticism was general, many scholars became ascetics, the great majority of the early monks appear to have been men who were not only absolutely ignorant themselves, but who also looked upon learning with positive disfavour. St. Antony, the true founder of monachism, refused when a boy to learn letters, because it would bring him into too great intercourse with other boys. At a time when St. Jerome had suffered himself to feel a deep admiration for the genius of Cicero, he was, as he himself tells us, borne in the night before the tribunal of Christ, accused of being rather a Ciceronian than a Christian, and severely flagellated by the angels." This saint, however, afterwards modified his opinions about the Pagan writings, and he was compelled to defend himself at length against his more jealous brethren, who accused him of defiling his writings with quotations from Pagan authors, and of employing some monks in copying Cicero, and of explaining Virgil to some children at Bethlehem. Of one monk it is related, that being especially famous as a linguist, he made it his penance to remain perfectly silent for thirty years. Of another, that having discovered a few books in the cell of a brother

la prophétie et des miracles. Ce sont des dons que sa Providence a presque toujours séparéz.'-Mém. Hist. ecclés. tome iv. p. 315.

1 St. Athanasius, Vit. Anton.

2 Ep. xxii. He says his shoulders were bruised when he awoke.

3 Ep. lxx.; Adv. Rufinum, lib. i. ch. xxx. He there speaks of his vision as a mere dream, not binding. He elsewhere (Ep. cxxv.) speaks very sensibly of the advantage of hermits occupying themselves, and says he learnt Hebrew to keep away unholy thoughts.

4 Sozomen, vi. 28; Rufinus, Hist. Monach, ch. vi.

Socrates tells rather

a touching story of one of these illiterate saints, named Pambos. Being unable to read, he came to some one to be taught a psalm. Having learnt the single verse, 'I said I will take heed to my ways, that I offend not with my tongue,' he went away, saying that was enough if it were practically acquired. When asked six months, and again many years after, why he did not come to learn another verse, he answered that he had never been able truly to master this. (II. E. iv. 23.)