ional
confession of a charm in the solitude of the rocks, of which he modifies
nevertheless the poignancy with his pocket newspaper, and from the
prolongation of which he thankfully escapes to the nearest table-d'hote,
ought to make us less scornful of the pride, and more intelligent of the
passion, in which the mountain anchorites of Arabia and Palestine
condemned themselves to lives of seclusion and suffering, which were
comforted only by supernatural vision, or celestial hope. That phases of
mental disease are the necessary consequence of exaggerated and
independent emotion of any kind must, of course, be remembered in
reading the legends of the wilderness; but neither physicians nor
moralists have yet attempted to distinguish the morbid states of
intellect[32] which are extremities of noble passion, from those which
are the punishments of ambition, avarice, or lasciviousness.

[Footnote 32: Gibbon's hypothetical conclusion respecting the effects
of self-mortification, and his following historical statement, must be
noted as in themselves containing the entire views of the modern
philosophies and policies which have since changed the monasteries of
Italy into barracks, and the churches of France into magazines. "This
voluntary martyrdom _must_ have gradually destroyed the sensibility,
both of mind and body; nor _can it be presumed_ that the fanatics who
torment themselves, are capable of any lively affection for the rest
of mankind. _A cruel unfeeling temper has characterized the monks of
every age and country._"

How much of penetration, or judgment, this sentence exhibits, I hope
will become manifest to the reader as I unfold before him the actual
history of his faith; but being, I suppose, myself one of the last
surviving witnesses of the character of recluse life as it still
existed in the beginning of this century, I can point to the
portraiture of it given by Scott in the introduction to 'The
Monastery' as one perfect and trustworthy, to the letter and to the
spirit; and for myself can say, that the most gentle, refined, and in
the deepest sense amiable, phases of character I have ever known, have
been either those of monks, or of servants trained in the Catholic
Faith.]

30. Setting all questions of this nature aside for the moment, my
younger readers need only hold the broad fact that during the whole of
the fourth century, multitudes of self-devoted men led lives of
extreme misery and poverty in the effo