are explicitly or covertly giving it to be understood that they have very little sympathy with the reformers, and that they would gladly put the nicene fathers in their room, are also favourably looking toward the ancient ascetic institute, in its several elements, and are not hesitating to recommend its characteristic articles. These momentous considerations and these facts, I recommend to the dispassionate attention of those whose consciences are not 'seared as with a hot iron.'

Let it not however be supposed that I would apply this, or any such phrase, in an opprobrious sense, to the present promoters of asceticism; or as if it implied, in their case, a moral turpitude, or a conscious resistance to truth perceived. What it does imply, in my own use of it in this instance, may be otherwise termed, a being given up to an INFATUATION, which, like a thick fog, actually conceals from the view objects the nearest at hand. Our own times have furnished two or three signal instances of this sort of strong delusion,' of which some have become the victims whose sincerity ought not to be questioned, and who have given notoriety to their pitiable fate by eminent powers of mind, and many shining accomplishments. In considering cases of this sort, a grim suspicion as to the real origin, or, as one might say-authorship of such delusions forces itself upon the mind, and returns, again and again, after it may have been dismissed at the remonstrance either of scepticism, or of charity. The counterfeit piety of the monastic system was the fatally successful' temptation' of the ancient church: the revival of the very same system, under the attractive colours of a highwrought refinement-to what can we trace it, but to the immortal craft of the same adversary?

313

THE EXTENT OF THE ASCETIC INSTITUTE, AND THE SANCTION IT RECEIVED FROM THE NICENE CHURCH.

NOTHING is more monotonous than the story of monkish life, whether pagan, christian, or mahometan. This ignis fatuus of the ecclesiastical levels, find it in what climate we may; or, whether we look for it in our own times, or in the middle ages, or in the nicene age, or in the remotest periods of history, shows the same forms, and the same hue. Like the long trains of figures that adorn the passages of an egyptian temple, there is throughout, one costume, one physiognomy, one style of attitudes, one dull ground, and one or two crude colours.

It is surprising to find in how small a degree either the widest diversities of religious belief, or the most extensive differences of climate and national character, have modified this immemorial species of insanity. During the lapse of at least three thousand years, the principles, the aim, the practices, and even the visible and graphic characteristics of the ascetics, whether eremite or cœnobite, have remained nearly the same; or have varied only as a flower in the green-house may differ from its variety, afield. It is, in fact, just thus that the nicene monkery is to be distinguished from that of the nubian gymnosophists, and the indian brachmans, of the remotest antiquity. The high and close temperature of the Church, brought out richer colours and more leafage; and even, sometimes, we may allow, a better fruit; but the plant has always been the same.

The chagrin of the romish missionaries in finding, wherever buddhism had prevailed, the very counterpart of their own

+

hierarchichal and monastic system, was occasioned by the near resemblance, or rather identity of all institutes founded upon the ascetic principle-' The devil,' said they, 'has been at work here, spitefully mimicking the Church, for our special mortification.' These good and zealous men would have kept nearer, at once, to historical and to theological truth, in saying that what the crafty adversary had really done was to set the Church mimicking pagan delusions.

Madmen are said to be insensible to changes of temperature; for the mind, having come under the tyranny of some one idea, or single class of impressions, ceases to be conscious of whatever might divert it. Sultry heat and extreme frost are the same to the maniac; and thus too, and it is a highly curious fact, the ascetics of the torrid zone were not surpassed, as to contempt of the extremes of heat and cold, by the anchorets of the then frozen forests of Germany and Gaul, who would give up no point of their discipline-a discipline borrowed from Syria and Egypt, during the utmost severities of a northern winter. Should this fortitude be regarded as the mild constancy of christian courage, or as the iron insensibility of lunacy?

The burning solitudes of Upper Egypt,* and the craggy seclusions of Nubia, had, from time immemorial, been occupied by a race of troglodyte sages, whose successors of the nicene era adhered to the very same modes of life, and professed the very same abstract principles, differing only in the phrases they made use of, and in the circumstance of putting themselves in alliance with the Church. The Church, on her part, acknowledged them as her most illustrious and devoted sons, and made them the objects of her unmeasured admiration. India was however the cradle of the anchoretic life, and Buddhu the father of its doctrines; and in like manner as all christendom, during many centuries, was accustomed to look to Egypt and Nubia for its brightest patterns of holy abstraction and mortification, so did these refer to the banks of the Indus and the Ganges, as the sources of their doctrine and practice.

The excavated rocks which, in earlier times, had been tenanted by robbers, or by outlaws, and afterwards by the coiners of base money, (Jerom. Vita S. Paul.) afforded sepulchral shelter to the christian ascetics.

*

Strabo, Arrian,+ Diodorus Siculus, Porphyry,§ Lucian,|| as well as several of the fathers, especially Clement of Alexandria,¶ and Augustine,** have handed down incidental notices of the philosophy and manners of the indian and egyptian gymnosophists, such as are amply sufficient for the purpose of identifying the ancient, and the more recent-the buddhist, and the christian ascetic institute. These professors of a divine philosophy, like their christian imitators, went nearly naked; they occupied caverns or chinks in the rocks; they abstained entirely from animal food; they professed inviolable virginity; they prac tised penance; they passed the greater part of their time in mute meditation; they imposed silence and absolute submission upon their disciples; they professed the doctrine that the perfection of human nature consists in an annihilation of the passions, and of every affection which nature has implanted, whether in the animal or the mental constitution: abnegation was, with them, the one point of wisdom and virtue; and a reabsorption of the human x soul into the abyss of the divine mind, was the happy end of the present system, to the pure and wise.

Now one might reasonably have supposed that a system of doctrine and practice such as this, if it were to come at all under the powerful influence of christianity, must have admitted some extensive modifications: but it was not so in fact:—a few phrases and another dialect, or slang, adopted, make almost all the difference which serves to distinguish the ancient gymnosophist, from the christian anchoret of the nicene age. If we are to confide in those highly encomiastic descriptions of these latter, which adorn the pages of the christian writers of that era, the one institute was a close imitation of the other. The extant information bearing on this subject, is not scanty, and it is furnished, explicitly, or is

Strabo, lib. xv.

↑ Arrian, Exped. Alex. lib. vii. c. 1; and Hist. Ind. c. 11.

↑ Diod. lib. ii.

§ Porph. de Abstinent. lib. iv.

|| Lucian, Fugitivi.

**

Clemens, Strom. lib. i. and iii.

August. Civ. Dei, lib. xiv. c. 17; and lib. xv. c. 20.

†† Non enim est hoc bonum, nisi cum fit secundum fidem summi boni, qui est Deus. Civ. Dei.

incidentally confirmed, by Eusebius, Socrates, Sozomen,* Theodoret, Athanasius, Palladius, Sulpitius Severus, Cassian, Jerome, Chrysostom, Basil, Augustine, Isidore, Ephrem; some of whom furnish the minutest details of the seraphic life,' and all speak of it in terms of wonder and admiration.

The more rigid and heroic of the christian anchorets dispensed with all clothing except a rug, or a few palm-leaves round the loins. Most of them abstained from the use of water for ablution; nor did they usually wash or change the garments they had once put on; thus St. Antony bequeathed to Athanasius a skin in which his sacred person had been wrapped for half a century. They also allowed their beards and nails to grow, and sometimes became so hirsute, as to be actually mistaken for hyænas or bears.§ It need not be said that celibacy was the first law of this institute, and that an abstinence the most rigid was its second law. Many, having scooped narrow cells in the crevices of precipitous rocks, built themselves in, leaving only a small aperture, and then depended entirely upon the piety of their disciples, or admirers, for supplying their daily wants. Of many it is affirmed that they had passed fifty years without exchanging a word with a human creature. Some inflicted upon themselves the tortures of perpetual ulceration.

Egypt seems to have been the centre of asceticism in its most terrible form; and it was therefore toward Egypt that the nicene writers directed the eyes of the Church, as to the high school of sacred wisdom. In Syria, in Arabia, and in the mountainous

Perhaps there is nowhere to be found a less exceptionable statement of the nature and purport of the monastic life than the one given by Sozomen, lib. i. c. 12. He subjoins also a reasonable history of the origin of the institution; but let the reader go on to the history of the monk Ammon! Jerom. Vita S. Paul.

It is idle to think of cleanliness in a hair-cloth!' Jerom. Vita Hilarion. *Η νιψάμενος κἂν τοὺς πόδας ὕδατι. Athan. Vita S. Ant. p. 504.

§ Palladius reports several instances of this kind: it is superfluous to cite passages in reference to facts which have been so often stated, and which no one calls in question. The only circumstance important to our argument is this, that the extravagances often spoken of as attaching to the more recent monkery took their pattern from the ascetics of the nicene age; and of this no one can entertain a doubt who reads Jerome, Cassian, Athanasius, Sulpitius, Palladius, and Socrates.