al care what
became the meanwhile of its evil tenement of flesh. If the body sinned,
sin was its element; it could not do other than sin; purity of conduct
could not make the body clean, and no amount of bodily indulgence could
shed a taint upon the spirit--a very comfortable doctrine, and one
which, under various disguises, has appeared a good many times on the
earth. But Christianity, shaking all this off, would present the body to
God as a pure and holy sacrifice, as so much of the material world
conquered from the appetites and lusts, and from the devil whose abode
they were. This was the meaning of the fastings and scourgings, the
penances and night-watchings; it was this which sent St. Anthony to the
tombs and set Simeon on his pillar, to conquer the devil in the flesh,
and keep themselves, if possible, undefiled by so much as one corrupt
thought.

And they may have been absurd and extravagant. When the feeling is
stronger than the judgment, men are very apt to be extravagant. If, in
the recoil from Manicheism, they conceived that a body of a saint thus
purified had contracted supernatural virtue and could work miracles,
they had not sufficiently attended to the facts, and so far are not
unexceptionable witnesses to them. Nevertheless they did their work, and
in virtue of it we are raised to a higher stage--we are lifted forward a
mighty step which we can never again retrace. Personal purity is not the
whole for which we have to care: it is but one feature in the ideal
character of man. The monks may have thought it was all, or more nearly
all than it is; and therefore their lives may seem to us poor, mean, and
emasculate. Yet it is with life as it is with science; generations of
men have given themselves exclusively to single branches, which, when
mastered, form but a little section in a cosmic philosophy; and in life,
so slow is progress, it may take a thousand years to make good a single
step. Weary and tedious enough it seems when we cease to speak in large
language, and remember the numbers of individual souls who have been at
work at the process; but who knows whereabouts we are in the duration
of the race? Is humanity crawling out of the cradle, or tottering into
the grave? Is it in nursery, in schoolroom, or in opening manhood? Who
knows? It is enough for us to be sure of our steps when we have taken
them, and thankfully to accept what has been done for us. Henceforth it
is impossible for us to give our un