almost to the time of Moses, certainly beyond Alexander the Great, who found it there in full force, and substantially with the same characteristics which it presents at the present day. Let us consider it a few moments.

The Vedas, portions of which date from the fifteenth century before Christ, the Laws of Menu, which were completed before the rise of Buddhism, that is six or seven centuries before our era, and the numerous other sacred books of the Indian religion, enjoin by example and precept entire abstraction of thought, seclusion from the world, and a variety of penitential and meritorious acts of self-mortifi

1 Compare the occasional notices of the Indian gymnosophists in Strabo (Lid. XV. c. 1, after accounts from the time of Alexander the Great), Arrian (Exped. Alex., Lib. VII. c. 1-3, and Hist. Ind., c. 11), Plinius (Hist. Nat., VII. 2), Diod. Sic. (Lib. II), Plutarch (Alex., 64), Porphyry (De abstinent, Lib. IV.), Lucian (Fugit. 7), Clemens Alex. (Strom. Lib. I. and III.), and August. (De civit. Dei., Lib. XIV. c. 17 : "Per opacas Indiae solitudines, quum quidam nudi philosophentur, unde gymnosophistae nominantur; adhibent tamen genitalibus tegmina, quibus per cetera membrorum carent"; and Lib. XV. 20, where he denies all merit to their celibacy, because it is not “secundum fidem summi boni, qui est Deus "). With these ancient representations agree the narratives of Fon Kounki (about 400, translated by M. A. Rémusat, Par., 1836), Marco Polo (1280), Bremer (1670), Hamilton (1700), Papi, Niebuhr, Orlich, Sonnerat, and others. See the older accounts of Catholic missionaries to Thibet, in Pinkerton's Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. VII., and also the recent work of Huc, a French missionary priest of the congregation of Lazare: Souvenirs d'un Voyage dans le Tartaric, le Thibet, et la Chine, pendant les années 1844-1846. Compare also on the whole subject, the two works of R. S. Hardy, "Eastern Monasticism," and "A Manual of Buddhism in its Modern Development; transl. from Singalese MSS." Lond. 1850. The striking affinity between Buddhism and Romanism extends, by the way, beyond monkery and convent-life to the hierarchical organization, with the Grand Lama for pope, and to the worship, with its ceremonies, feasts, processions, pilgrimages, confessional, a kind of mass, prayers for the dead, extreme unction, etc. The view is certainly at least plausible, to which the great geographer, Carl Ritter (Erdkunde, II. p. 283 – 299, 2d ed.), has given the weight of his name, that the Lamaists in Thibet borrowed their religious forms and ceremonics in part from the Nestorian missionaries. But this view is a mere hypothesis, and is rendered improbable by the fact that Buddhism in Cochin China, Tonquin, and Japan, where no Nestorian missionaries ever were, shows the same striking resemblance to Romanism as the Lamaism of Thibet, Tartary, and North China. Respecting the singular tradition of Prester John, or the Christian priest-king in Eastern Asia, which arose about the eleventh century, and respecting the Nestorian missions, see Ritter, 1. c.

cation, by which the devotee assumes a proud superiority over the vulgar herd of mortals, and is absorbed at last into the divine fountain of all being. The ascetic system is essential alike to Brahmanism and Buddhism, the two opposite and yet cognate branches of the Indian religion, which in many respects are similarly related to each other, as Judaism is to Christianity, or also as Romanism to Protestantism; Buddhism is a later reformation of Brahmanism; it dates probably from the sixth century before Christ (according to other accounts, much earlier); and, although subsequently expelled by the Brahmins from Hindostan, it embraces more followers than any other heathen religion, since it rules in Farther India, nearly all the Indian islands, Japan, Thibet, a great part of China, and Central Asia to the borders of Sibera. But the two religions start from opposite principles. The Brahmanic asceticism' proceeds from a pantheistic view of the world; the Buddhistic, from an atheistic and nihilistic, yet very earnest, view; the one is controlled by the idea of the absolute but abstract unity and a feeling of contempt of the world; the other, by the idea of the absolute but unreal variety and a feeling of deep grief over the emptiness and nothingness of all existence; the one is predominantly objective, positive, and idealistic; the other, more subjective, negative, and realistic; the one aims at an absorption into the universal spirit of Brahma; the other, consistently, into an absorption into nonentity, if it be true that Buddhism starts from an atheistic rather than a pantheistic or dualistic basis. "Brahmanism," says a modern writer on the subject, "looks back to the beginning; Buddhism, to the end; the former loves cosmogony; the latter, eschatology. Both reject the existing world; the Brahman despises it because he contrasts it with the higher being of Brahma; the Buddhist bewails it because of its

1 The Indian word for it is tapas, i.e. the burning out, or the extinction, of the individual being, and its absorption into the essence of Brahma.

2 Ad. Wuttke, in his able and instructive work, Das Geistesleben der Chinesen, Japaner, und Indier (second part of his History of Heathenism), 1853, p. 593.

unrealness; the former sees God in all; the other, emptiness in all." Yet, as all extremes meet, the abstract all-entity of Brahmanism and the equally abstract nonentity or vacuity of Buddhism come to the same thing in the end, and may lead to the same ascetic practices. The asceticism of Brahmanism takes more the direction of anchoretism, while that of Buddhism exists generally in the social form of regular convent life.

The Hindu monks or gymnosophists (naked philosophers), as the Greeks called them, live in woods, caves, on mountains or rocks, in poverty, celibacy, abstinence, silence, sleeping on straw or the bare ground, crawling on the belly, standing all day on tiptoe, exposed to the pouring rain or scorching sun, with four fires kindled around them, presenting a savage and frightful appearance, yet greatly revered by the multitude, especially the women, and performing miracles, not unfrequently completing their austerities by suicide at the stake or in the waves of the Ganges. Thus they are described by the ancients and by modern travellers. The Buddhist monks are less fanatical and extravagant than the Hindu yogis and fakirs. They depend mainly on fasting, prayer, psalmody, intense contemplation, and the use of the whip, to keep their rebellious flesh in subjection. They have a fully developed system of monasticism in connection with their priesthood, and a large number of convents, also nunneries for female devotees. The Buddhist monasticism, especially in Thibet, with its vows of celibacy, poverty, and obedience, its common meals, readings, and various pious exercises, bears such a remarkable resemblance to that of the Roman Catholic church, that older Roman missionaries thought it could be only explained as a diabolical imitation. But the original always precedes the caricature, and the ascetic system was completed in India long before the introduction of Christianity, even if we should trace this back to Saint Bartholomew and Saint Thomas.

The Hellenic heathenism was less serious and contem

plative, indeed, than the Oriental; yet the Pythagoreans were a kind of monastic society, and the Platonic view of matter and of body not only lies at the bottom of the Gnostic and Manichaean asceticism, but had much to do also with the ethics of Origen and the Alexandrian school.

Judaism, apart from the ancient Nazarites,' had its Essenes in Palestine, and its Therapeutae in Egypt; though these betray the intrusion of foreign elements into the Mosaic religion, and so find no mention in the New Testament.

Lastly, Mohammedanism, though in mere imitation of Christian and pagan examples, has, as is well known, its dervises and cloisters.1

Now, were these earlier phenomena the source, or only analogies, of the Christian monasticism? That a multitude of foreign usages and rites made their way into the church in the age of Constantine, is undeniable. Hence many have held that monasticism also came from heathenism, and was an apostasy from apostolic Christianity, which Paul had plainly foretold in the Pastoral Epistles.5 But such a

1 Comp. Num. vi. 1-21.

2 Compare the remarkable description of these Jewish monks by the elder Pliny (Hist. Natur. V. 15): “Gens sola, et in toto orbe praeter caeteros mira, sine ulla femina, omni venere abdicata, sine pecunia, socia palmarum. Ita per seculorum millia (incredibile dictu) gens aeterna est in qua nemo nascitur. Tam foecunda illis aliorum vitae penitentia est."

Eusebius (Eccl. Hist. II. 17) erroneously takes them for Christians.

4 II. Ruffner (The Fathers of the Desert, Vol. I. chap. 11.-1x., N. York, 1850) gives an extended description of these extra-Christian forms of monasticism, and derives the Christian from them, especially from the Buddhist.

So even Calvin, who, in his Commentary on 1 Tim. iv. 3, refers Paul's prophecy of the ascetic apostasy primarily to the Eucratites, Gnostics, Montanists, and Manichacans, but extends it also to the Papists: quando coelibatum et ciborum abstinentiam severius urgent quam ullum Dei praeceptum. So, recently, Ruffner, and especially Isaac Taylor, who, in his "Ancient Christianity" (Vol. I. p. 299 sqq.), has a special chapter on the Predicted Ascetic Apostasy. The best modern interpreters, however, are agreed that the apostle has the heretical Gnostic dualistic asceticism in his eye, which forbade marriage and certain meats as intrinsically impure; whereas the Roman and Greek churches make marriage a sacrament, subordinate it only to celibacy, and limit the prohibition of it to priests and monks. The application of 1 Tim. iv. 1 – 3 to the Catholic church is therefore admissible, at most, only in a partial and indirect way.

view can hardly be reconciled with the great place of this phenomenon in history; and would, furthermore, involve the entire ancient church, with its greatest and best representatives, both east and west,-its Athanasius, its Chrysostom, its Jerome, its Augustine,-in the predicted apostasy from the faith. And no one will now hold that these men, who all admired and commended the monastic life, were antichristian errorists, and that the few and almost exclusively negative opponents of that asceticism, as Jovinian, Helvidius, and Vigilantius, were the sole representatives of pure Christianity in the Nicene and next following age.

In this whole matter we must carefully distinguish two forms of asceticism, antagonistic and irreconcilable in spirit and principle, though similar in form-the Gnostic dualistic and the Catholic. The former of these did certainly come from heathenism; but the latter sprang independently from the Christian spirit of self-denial and longing for moral perfection, and, in spite of all its excrescences, has fulfilled an important mission in the history of the church.

The pagan monachism, the pseudo-Jewish, the heretical Christian, above all the Gnostic and Manichaean, is based on an irreconcilable metaphysical dualism between mind and matter; the catholic Christian monachism arises from the moral conflict between the spirit and the flesh. The former is prompted throughout by spiritual pride and selfishness; the latter, by humility and love to God and man. The false asceticism aims at annihilation of the body and pantheistic absorption of the human being in the divine; the Christian strives after the glorification of the body and personal fellowship with the living God in Christ. And the effects of the two are equally different. Though it is also unquestionable that, notwithstanding this difference of principle, and despite the condemnation of Gnosticism and Manichaeism, the heathen dualism exerted a powerful influence on the catholie asceticism and its view of the world, particularly upon anchoretism and monasticism in the East, and has been fully transcended only in evangelical Protestantism. The precise