may console himself with the proud consciousness of merit, and may, even on the ground of severe justice, gain a right of retaliation.

At this point then there comes in hope, and a new emotion, to give alacrity to the fortitude of the soul. The conscience-stricken man discovers that he possesses within himself (as if it were an inexhaustible fund) the power of enduring privations and pains-he may deny every gratification, he may sustain without a groan the most extreme anguish, he may live only to suffer. And in his mode of estimating the absolving value of bodily torment he reckons that, whatever price may be put upon those pains or wants which a man endures unwillingly, and from which he has no means of escaping, the merit of the same amount of affliction borne voluntarily, is tenfold greater.* Whoever then has the fortitude to inflict misery upon himself, may boldly defy vindictive Power; for he commands the means of adding merit to merit, at such a rate of rapid accumulation as shall presently outstrip the reckoning of the adversary.

· Οὐ γὰρ ὁ ἀπορῶν τῶν ἀναγκαίων καρτερικὸς, ἀλλ ̓ ὁ ἐν ἀφθονίᾳ τῆς ἀπολαύσεως γκαρτερῶν τοῖς δεινοῖς. So says Basil; and the sertiment might be put at the head of volumes of spurious morality.

"Not a few of those who peopled, first the deserts, and afterwards the monasteries, were such as the "Blessed" eremite whom Palladius describes (Lausaic Hist. c. 19.)—a homicide-we take his word for it that he was not a murderer, who, in terror of justice, and under horror of conscience-μηδενὶ μηδὲν εἰρηκὼς, καταλαμβάνει τὴν ἔρημον -where, unsheltered, he wandered, lost to all feeling three years;

Fanaticism (the fanaticism of personal infliction) is not ripened until it approaches this point. That is to say, it wants spring and warmth ;-it is not tumid;-it has no heroism so long as mere dread, and the sense of guilt, are uppermost in the mind. But when pride takes its high standing upon the supposition of merit won, and when Invisible Powers are deemed to have been foiled, then the spirit gets freedom and soars.-Pitiable triumph of the lacerated heart that thus vaunts itself in miseries as useless as they are horrid! - Must we not mourn the infatuations of our nature, as we watch the ascent of the soul that climbs the sky only to carry there a sullen defiance of Eternal Justice! So the bird of prey, beat off from the fold, and torn with the shepherd's shafts its plumage ruffled, and stained with gore, flaps the wing on high, and fronts the sun as if to boast before heaven of its audacity and its wounds!

It is after it has passed this stage, or when

but afterwards built for himself a cell, and acquired celebrity as an eminent practitioner of austerities. I wished to know from him, says our author, with what feeling he now regarded the fatal act that had driven him into solitude :-he replied, that, far from thinking of it with regret, it was a ground of thanksgiving-γεγένηται γὰρ μοί φησιν ὑπόθεσις σωτηρίας ὁ ἀκούσιος φόνος. The profession is susceptible of a good meaning, and charity requires that we should so receive it. Nothing indeed would be more outrageous than to deny universally the piety and sincerity of even the most extravagant class of the anchorets. Better speak on such subjects like Alban Butler than like Gibbon.

fear and humiliation give way to hope, to pride, or perhaps to revenge, that secondary motives are brought in, and fanaticism becomes a mixed sentiment, and is lowered in its tone; not seldom degenerates into farce or hypocrisy, and at length perhaps quite evaporates. Secondary motives of this kind would never be listened to if it were not for the alleviations that arise from habit. The pains of mere privation, terrible as they seem to the luxurious, the human mind soon learns to endure without repining; nay, it derives at length a sombre satisfaction from the very paucity of its sources of comfort. A reaction, such as this, is not of rare occurrence.-Certain tempers are alive to an emotion of personal independence which, when fully kindled, makes it delicious to a man to find that, in comparison with those around him, he is free from solicitude, because free from wants;-that a mere morsel of the coarsest food is all he is compelled to ask from the grudging world; and that the thraldom of artificial life is a bondage he has broken."

The habitude of positive pain, as well as that of mere privation, brings too its relief:-there is

To a naked eremite St. Bernard, pro signo caritatis, sent a cloak and boots, which he kindly received, and, as an act of humility and obedience, put on; yet presently, like a true New Zealander, laid aside as intolerable. Et nunc, said he, pro amore ipsius, vestimenta transmissa obedienter accepi, et indui; diutius tamen ea portare non valeo, quia nec opus est mihi; nec ipse mandavit. Dico autem vobis, amicis meis carissimis, quia nihil est mihi molestius quàm ut curæ carnis sarcinam odiosam, cum tanta difficultate depositam, lassatis et dolentibus humeris denuo imponere cogar.

a torpor partly of the nerve, but chiefly of the mind, which more and more blunts physical sensibility;-and there is an art learned in the school of chronic suffering, which teaches so to shift the burden of anguish as that it may not any where gall to the quick. Moreover there is a power of abstraction from bodily sensations which long experience calls into exercise, and which may at length (even while matter and mind continue partners) almost set the conscious principle at large from its sympathy with mere flesh and nerve. Pain, at its first onset, condenses the soul upon a point; or brings the whole of the sensitive faculty to the one centre of anguish : but habit of pain loosens this concentration, and allows the mind to occupy a wider surface.

The eulogists of the ascetic saints boast often of the absolute insensibility to pain, to thirst, and to hunger, which some of their heroes had attained to. In certain instances the leathern girdle-zona pellicea, hoc est, ex crudo corioad macerationem procurandam - was found, after death, to have lodged itself (shall we say as a seton?) in the integuments around the loins; so as (in ordinary cases) to have occasioned intense suffering: yet never had the secret been betrayed to the fraternity by any indications of uneasiness. Instances still more extreme, and far too revolting to describe, abound in the monkish records. If the facts are admitted as true, and they cannot altogether be

rejected, it must be believed that a state of extreme mental abstraction not merely diverts the sense of pain; but prevents also that physical excitement which ordinarily attends excruciating torture, and which wastes the animal force. We must attribute to the same influence of the mind the power acquired by some of the hermits of northern Europe to resist the most intense coldunclothed and unsheltered. The instances are numerous, and are too familiarly spoken of to be reasonably called in question. In the tenth, eleventh, and twelfth centuries, the forests of France and Germany were haunted by naked anchorets who, round the year, roamed about, refusing even the comforts of a cavern, and were wont to repose at night on the fresh fallen snow."

7 After deducting from these narratives all the miracles, the bare fact is miracle enough. These stories could not have been sheer inventions. It is difficult to choose among the abundance of examples; and so much the more difficult, because it is hard to find one in which the venerable language of Holy Scripture is not frightfully misapplied to the follies of superstition. The author of the Book de Miraculis Cisterciensium Monachorum, thus speaks of one who, pro Christo quotidie moriens, non unam tantum, sed innumeras cruces et mortes sustinuit: quia quot diebus in eremo vixit, quasi tot martyria duxit. . . . . . . Annis siquidem quatuor decem solivagus ac toto corpore nudus, montibus et silvis pro Christo amore oberrans et latitans perduravit, cœlum habens pro tecto, aërem pro vestimento, pecorinum victum pro cibo humano. Ten years, without flinching from his purpose, the hermit lived abroad; but at length yielded a little to the weakness of nature. Postmodum autem quatuor fere annis ante suam dormitionem, in corde hyemis, bruma sæviente asperrima, cum tellus, nivibus obruta, et gelu acriore coercita, nec herbas foris exsereret, nec radices effodi sineret; tunc à facie famis et hujus frigoris sustinere non prævalens, tandem ut homo jam fere præmortuus, obeso corpore, pelle sola circumdatus, cogebatur interdum deserta descrere, atque ad proxima rura, volendo nolendo, descendere.