you be not partakers of her sins, that ye receive not of her plagues; for her sins have reached unto heaven, and God hath remembered her iniquities.

The same belief was one of the causes of the reckless Crusades, and at the end of every century there have been visionaries who were convinced that it would be the last, and prepared themselves accordingly. "Where this expectation is a living force" writes Harnack, "life, as usually lived, can no longer maintain an independent value, however conscientiously a man may recognize the calls of duty."

7. Great calamities, such as earthquakes, floods, fires, famines, plagues, etc., are the best agents for creating the ascetic temperament.

The Flagellants, or the Brethren of the Cross, as they sometimes styled themselves, a pathological religious sect born during the terrible Black Death of the 14th century, is a case in point. This sect, consisting at first of members of the lower classes, but soon augmented by nobles, ecclesiastics, learned men and women, and even children, endeavored to do penance for the people in the hope of averting the plague. The movement began in Hungary and later spread all over Europe. Led by prominent men and singers bearing tapers and magnificent banners of velvet and cloth of gold, they marched in well organized processions, robed in sombre garments with red crosses on the breast, back, and cap; their heads covered as far as the eyes, their looks fixed on the ground, and presenting a very sad and mournful spectacle.1 Schaff gives the following description of their processions and actions: When they came to towns, the bands marched in regular military order and singing hymns. At the time of the flagellation they selected a square, or churchyard or field. Taking off their shoes and stockings, and forming a circle, they girded themselves with aprons and laid down flat on the ground. . . . The leader then stepped over each one, touched them with a whip, and bade them rise. As each was touched they followed their leader and imitated him. Once all on their feet the flagellation began. The brethren went two by two around the whole circle, striking their backs till the blood trickled down from the wounds. The whip consisted of three thongs each with

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1See Hecker: Epidemics of the Middle Ages, pp. 34 ff.

four iron teeth. During the flagellations a hymn was sung. After all had gone around the circle, the whole body again fell to the ground, beating upon their breasts. On arising they flagellated themselves a second time. 1

Even now, there are some who consider a national calamity a visitation from God, who has been angered, and needs therefore to be appeased. Again, the many ascetic sects of Russia, counting thirteen millions, mostly peasants, owe their birth to their poverty and wretchedness, and to the tyrannical oppressions and persecutions of the government. When adversity of any kind overwhelms him, man either curses God and spitefully throws all rules and morals to the wind, or he hastens to Him, and with shaved head and in sackcloth and ashes, falls upon the ground and supplicates His mercy. Poor worm of the dust! when we remember his utter helplessness against the forces of nature, and his profound ignorance of their modi operandi, we cannot but sympathize with the frantic and irrational means he takes to insure himself against them.

8 Lastly there have been in every land and age a large number of individuals of a passive temperament who have become ascetics because such a life was most natural and comfortable for them; in it is their line of least resistance. They cannot possibly adapt themselves to the ordinary humdrum of active life, with its various pleasures and pains for which they have no taste, and are willing to purchase at the cost of great privations, solitude and silence, in which they can satisfy their contemplative tendencies undisturbed, and develop their mental and spiritual faculties at the expense of their physical and social instincts and desires. Ascetics of this type are most numerous in the Orient, where the love of tranquility and meditation is very pronounced, but they are not wanting in the West. However, they are more philosophical than the ordinary religious ascetics.

Such in brief are the varieties of genuine ascetics. What can our estimate of them be, other than that with a few notable exceptions they were all extremely egoistical and antisocial, in that they were concerned only with their own well being and salvation, and spared not a thought for their fellow men, not even for their nearest kith and kin; men of passive and pessimistic temperaments, out of harmony with

1 Religious Encyclopedia, article, Flagellants.

their environment, possessed of one all-engrossing idea, denizens of another world; in a single word, morbid. The world is surely no better for their having lived or rather existed, for there is nothing in their lives which we can admire today, not even their virtue; for they were virtuous because they fled the world and its temptations, and not because they remained in it and overcame them.

"I cannot praise," said Milton, "a fugitive and cloistered virtue unexercised and unbreathed, that never sallies out and sees her adversary, but slinks out of the race, where that immortal garland is to be run for, not without dust and heat. Assuredly we bring not innocence into the world; we bring impurity much rather; that which purifies us is trial, and trial is by what is contrary. That virtue, therefore, which is but a youngling in the contemplation of evil, and knows not the utmost that vice promises to her followers, and rejects it, is but a blank virtue, not a pure.

We have called these genuine ascetics because however bizarre their actions, however gloomy and morbid their views and beliefs, however unnatural and abnormal their lives, they were at least sincere and serious in all they did and believed, and for that reason, if for no other, they commanded respect and admiration from their contemporaries. But when ascetism became fashionable, so to speak, when a halo of glory and sanctity encircled it; monasticism was born, and hosts of individuals in whom the passion was not deep-seated, who were without the inward strength for the life, and without the deep spiritual impulse,'' but who found in the monasteries an opportunity to lead a life of ease and inactivity, flocked to them, with the result that soon the whole life became degraded. Pride, mental disorders, insanity, self-mutilations, often to the extent of suicide resulted; and sometimes violent reaction to unbridled licentiousness. "Thousands had gone out," writes Harnack, "and the reputation of sanctity, dissatisfaction with the world, or dislike of work, enticed thousands after them. Of inducements to a monastic life there were many, especially since the establishment of a State Church, when a real or affected enthusiasm no longer led to martyrdom.

Gibbon states that the monasteries were filled by a crowd of obscure and abject plebeians, who gained in the cloister much more than they had sacrificed in the world. Peasants, slaves, and mechanics might escape from poverty and con

tempt to a safe and honorable profession, where apparent hardships were mitigated by custom, by popular applause, and by the secret relaxation of discipline.' Further, he writes: "The subjects of Rome, whose persons and fortunes were made responsible for unequal and exorbitant tributes, retired from the oppression of the imperial government; and the pusillanimous youth preferred the penance of a monastic to the dangers of a military life. The affrighted provincials of every rank, who fled before the barbarians, found shelter and subsistence; whole legions were buried in these religious sanctuaries; and the same cause which relieved the distress of individuals, impaired the strength and fortitude of the empire. "'1

Likewise, Jerome bewailed the fact that individuals of the lowest classes became monks because they found the life easy and comfortable, and could use it as a convenient cloak to hide their vices and crimes. Many became wandering beggars and quacks selling sham relics to the credulous, and playing on the tender feelings of the sympathetic, somewhat as professional tramps do to-day.

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That the conditions were not improved in later times is evident from the many burlesques on the monks, the frequent protest of earnest spirits, and the rigid rules drawn up to regulate and fetter their lascivious lives. A letter from Erasmus to an English bishop is interesting in this connection. The monastic profession," he writes, "may be honorable in itself. Genuine monks we can respect; but where are they? What monastic character have those we see except the dress and the tonsure? It would be wrong to say that there are no exceptions; but I beseech you you who are a good pure man-go round the religious houses in your own diocese; how much will you find of Christian piety? The mendicant orders are the worst- they are hated, and they know why; but they will not mend their lives, and think to bear down opposition with insolence and force. Augustine says that there are nowhere better men than in the monasteries, and nowhere worse. What would he say now, if he saw so many of these houses both of men and women little better than brothels? I speak of these places as they exist now among ourselves - Immortal Gods! how

1 Decline and Fall, Vol. 6.

small is the number where you will find Christianity of any kind ?" 1

It was unavoidable that the monasteries, harboring so many individuals of loose characters, living an institutional life, which is itself favorable for the development of mental disorders of various kinds, in enforced celibacy, and ofttimes in idleness, should become hotbeds of vice and corruption.

"

St. Theresa vigorously denounced the life she had seen in the unreformed convents, declaring it to be a "short cut to hell!" Rather let fathers," she advised, marry their daughters basely, than allow them to face dangers of ten worlds rolled into one where youth, sensuality and the devil invite and incline them to follow things worldly and of the worldly.'

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The very term Muliers Subintroductae' is suggestive of the immoral conditions existing in the monasteries. In the time of St. Cyprian, and even much later, monks kept their mistresses, under various pretexts, in their houses. 66 Noble ladies, pretending a desire to live a life of continence, abandoned their husbands to live with low-born lovers. Palestine, which soon became the centre of pilgrimages, had become, in the time of St. Gregory of Nyssa, a hotbed of debauchery. The luxury and ambition of the higher prelates, and the passion for amusements of the inferior priests, were bitterly acknowledged. St. Jerome complained that the banquets of the many bishops eclipsed in splendor those of the provincial governors, and the intrigues by which they obtained offices, and the fierce partisanship of their supporters, appear in every page of ecclesiastical history." 8

Fanaticism, cruel intolerance, party hatred and violence, narrow bigotry, and even bloody persecution of those who opposed them, these terrible and unchristian vices were seen among monks, even in very early times, and stain the records of Monasticism in its palmiest days. Of the evil effect on the mental health of the inmates, Lecky writes: "A melancholy, leading to desperation, known to theologians under the name of acedia,' was not uncommon in monasteries. The frequent suicides of monks, sometimes to escape the world, sometimes through despair at their inability to quell

1 Woodhouse: The Military Religious Orders of the Middle Ages, pp. 240--241.

2 Woodhouse: op. cit., p. 238.

Lecky: Hist. of European Morals, 2, p. 162.