course with men interrupted the visits of the angels; whence arose the report that he held intercourse with angels.1

It is no recommendation to these ascetic eccentricities that, while they are without scripture authority, they are fully equalled and even surpassed by the strange modes of self-torture practised by ancient and modern Hindu devotees, for the supposed benefit of their souls and the gratification of their vanity, in the presence of admiring spectators. Some bury themselves, we are told by ancient and modern travellers, in pits, with only small breathing holes at the top; while others, disdaining to touch the vile earth, live in iron cages suspended from trees. Some wear heavy iron collars or fetters, or drag a heavy chain, fastened by one end round their privy parts, to give ostentatious proof of their chastity. Others keep their fists hard shut, until their finger nails grow through the palms of their hands. Some stand perpetually on one leg; others keep their faces turned over one shoulder, until they cannot turn them back again. Some lie on wooden beds, bristling all over with iron spikes; others are fastened for life to the trunk of a tree by a chain. Some suspend themselves for half an hour at a time, feet uppermost, or with a hook thrust through their naked backs, over a hot fire. Alexander von Humboldt, at Astracan, where some Hindus had settled, found a yogi in the vestibule of the temple naked, shrivelled up and overgrown with hair, like a wild beast, who in this position had withstood, for twenty years, the severe winters of that climate. A Jesuit missionary describes one of the class called Taparoinas, that he had his body enclosed in an iron cage, with his head and feet outside, so that he could walk, but neither sit nor lie down; at night his pious attendants attached a hundred lighted lamps to the outside of the cage, so that their master could exhibit himself walking as the mock-light of the world.2

In general, the hermit life confounds the fleeing from the

1 L. c. I. c. 11.

2 See Ruffner, 1. c. I. 49 seq. and Wuttke 1. c. p. 369. seq.

outward world with the mortification of the inward world of the corrupt heart. It mistakes the duty of love; not rarely, under its mask of humility and the utmost self-denial, cherishes spiritual pride and jealousy; and exposes itself to all the dangers of solitude, even to savage barbarism, beastly grossness, or despair and suicide. Anthony, the father of anchorets, well understood this, and warned his followers against overvaluing solitude, reminding them of the proverb of the Preacher (iv. 10): "Woe to him that is alone when he falleth; for he hath not another to help him up."

The cloister life was less exposed to these errors. It approached the life of society and civilization. Yet, on the other hand, it produced no such heroic phenomena, and had dangers peculiar to itself. Chrysostom gives us the bright side of it, from his own experience. "Before the rising of the sun," says he of the monks of Antioch, "they rise hale and sober, sing as with one mouth hymns to the praise of God, then bow the knee in prayer under the direction of the abbot, read the Holy scriptures, and go to their labors; pray again at nine, twelve, and three o'clock; after a good day's work enjoy a simple meal of bread and salt, perhaps with oil, and sometimes with pulse; sing a thanksgiving hymn, and lay themselves on their pallets of straw without care, grief, or murmur. When one dies, they say: he is perfected; and all pray God for a like end, that they also may come to the eternal sabbath-rest and to the vision of Christ." Men like Chrysostom, Basil, Gregory, Jerome, Nilus, and Isidore, united theological studies with the ascetic exercises of solitude, and thus gained a copious knowledge of scripture and a large spiritual experience.

But most of the monks either could not even read, or had too little intellectual culture to devote themselves with advantage to contemplation and study, and only brooded over gloomy feelings, or sank, in spite of the unsensual tendency of the ascetic principle, into the coarsest anthropomorphism and image worship. When the religious enthusiasm faltered or ceased, the cloister life, like the hermit life,

became the most spiritless and tedious routine, or hypocritically practised secret vices. For the monks carried with them into their solitude their most dangerous enemy in their hearts, and there often endured much fiercer conflicts with flesh and blood than amidst the society of men.

The temptations of sensuality, pride, and ambition externalized and personified themselves to the anchorets and monks in hellish shapes, which appeared in visions and dreams, now in pleasing and seductive, now in threatening and terrible, forms and colors, according to the state of mind at the time. The monastic imagination peopled the deserts and solitudes with the very worst society, with swarms of winged demons and all kinds of hellish monsters.' It substituted thus a new kind of polytheism for the heathen gods, which were generally supposed to be evil spirits. The monastic demonology and demonomachy is a strange mixture of gross superstitions and deep spiritual experiences. It forms the romantic, shady side of the otherwise so tedious monotony of the secluded life, and contains much material for the history of ethics, psychology, and pathology.

Especially besetting were the temptations of sensuality, and irresistible without the utmost exertion and constant watchfulness. The same saints, who could not conceive of true chastity without celibacy, were disturbed, according to their own confession, by unchaste dreams, which at least defiled the imagination. Excessive asceti

1 According to a sensuous and local conception of Eph. vi. 12: Tà пvevμatikà τῆς πονηρίας ἐν τοῖς ἐπουρανίοις ; “die bösen Geister unter dem Himmel” (evil spirits under heaven), as Luther translates, while the Vulgate gives it literally, but somewhat obscurely: Spiritualia nequitiae in coelestibus; and the English Bible quite too freely: "Spiritual wickedness in high places." In any case πvevμatiká is to be taken in a much wider sense than ἐπνεύματα or δαιμόνια; and ουράνια, also, is not fully identical with the cloud-heaven, or the atmosphere, and besides admits a different construction, so that many put a comma after rovnplas. The monastic satanology and demonology, we may remark, was universally received in the ancient church and throughout the Middle Age. And it is well known that Luther retained from his monastic life a sensuous, materialistic idea of the devil and of his influence on men.

2 Athanasius says of St. Anthony, that the devil sometimes appeared to him

cism sometimes turned into unnatural vice; sometimes ended in madness, despair, and suicide. Pachomius tells us, so early as his day, that many monks cast themselves down precipices, others ripped themselves up, and others put themselves to death in other ways.1

A characteristic trait of monasticism in all its forms is a morbid aversion to female society and a rude contempt of married life. No wonder, then, that in Egypt and the whole East, the land of monasticism, wornan and domestic life never attained their proper dignity, and to this day remain at a very low stage of culture. Among the rules of Basil is a prohibiton of speaking with a woman, touching one, or even looking on one, except in unavoidable cases. Monasticism not seldom sundered the sacred bond between husband and wife, commonly with mutual consent, as in the cases of Ammon and Nilus, but often even without it. Indeed, a law of Justinian seems to give either party an unconditional right of desertion, while yet the word of God declares the marriage bond indissoluble. The council of Gangra found it necessary to oppose the notion that marriage is inconsistent with salvation, and to exhort wives to remain with their husbands. In the same way monasticism came into conflict with love of kindred, and with the relation of parents to children; misinterpreting the Lord's command to leave all

in the form of a woman; Jerome relates of St. Hilarion, that in bed his imagination was often beset with visions of naked women. Jerome himself acknowledges, in a letter to a virgin (!) (Epist. 18, ad Eustochium): "O quoties in eremo constitutus in illa vasta solitudine, quae exusta solis ardoribus horridum monachis praebebat habitaculum, putavi me Romanis interesse deliciis. . . . . Ille igitur ego, qui ob gehennae metum tali me carcere ipse damnaveram, scorpionum tantum socius et ferarum, saepe choris intereram puellarum. Pallebant ora jejuniis, et mens desideriis aestuabat in frigido corpore, et ante hominem suum jam in carne praemortua, sola libidinum incendia bulliebant Itaque omni auxilio destitutus, ad Jesu jacebam pedes, rigabam lacrymis, crine tergebam et repugnantem carnem hebdomadarum inedia subjugabam." St. Ephraim warns against listening to the enemy, who whispers to the monk: Οὐ δυνατὸν παύσασθαι ἀπό σου, ἐὰν μὴ πληροφορήσῃς ἐπιθυμίαν σου.

1 Vita Pach. § 61 Compare Nilus. Epist., Lib. II. ep. 140: Tivès. . . . . ἑαυτοὺς ἔσφαξαν μαχαίρα, etc. Even among the fanatical Circumcelliones, Donatist mendicant monks in Africa, suicide was not uncommon.

for his sake. Nilus demanded of the monk the entire suppression of the sense of blood-relationship. Saint Anthony forsook his younger sister, and saw her only once after the separation. His disciple Prior, when he became a monk, vowed never to see his kindred again, and would not even speak with his sister without closing his eyes. Something of the same sort is recorded of Pachomius. Ambrose and Jerome, in all earnest, enjoined upon virgins the cloister life, even against the will of their parents. When Hilary of Poictiers heard that his daughter wished to marry, he is said to have prayed God to take her to himself by death. One Mucius, without any provocation, caused his own son to be cruelly abused, and at last, at the command of the abbot himself, cast him into the water, whence he was rescued by a brother of the cloister.

Even in the most favorable case, monasticism falls short of harmonious moral development, and of that symmetry of virtue which meets us in perfection in Christ, and next to him in the apostles. It lacks the firm and gentler traits of character, which are ordinarily brought out only in the school of daily family life, and under the social ordinances of God. Its morality is rather negative than positive. There is more virtue in the temperate and thankful enjoyment of the gifts of God than in total abstinence; in charitable and wellseasoned speech than in total silence; in connubial chastity than in celibacy; in self-denying, practical labor for the church than in solitary asceticism, which only pleases self and profits no one else.

Catholicism, whether Greek or Roman, cannot dispense with the monastic life. It knows only moral extremes, nothing of the healthful mean. In addition to this, Popery needs the monastic orders, as an absolute monarchy needs large standing armies, both for conquest and defence. But evangelical Protestantism-rejecting all distinction of a two

1 Tillem., VII. 430. The abbot thereupon, as Tillemont relates, was informed by a revelation, "que Muce avait egalè par son obeissance celle d' Abraham," and soon after made him his successor.