ubstance, "my only comfort in the midst of the miseries of
this earthly life is to see thee constantly, and to behold in thy traits
the faithful image of my beloved husband, who is no more. When you have
buried me and joined my ashes with those of your father, nothing will
then prevent you from retiring into the monastic life. But so long as I
breathe, support me by your presence, and do not draw down upon you the
wrath of God by bringing such evils upon me who have given you no
offence." This singularly tender petition was granted, but Chrysostom
turned his home into a monastery, slept on the bare floor, ate little
and seldom, and prayed much by day and by night.

After his mother's death Chrysostom enjoyed the seclusion of a monastic
solitude for six years, but impairing his health by excessive
self-mortification he returned to Antioch in 380. He rapidly rose to a
position of commanding influence in the church. His peerless oratorical
and literary gifts were employed in elevating the ascetic ideal and in
unsparing denunciations of the worldly religion of the imperial court.
He incurred the furious hatred of the young and beautiful Empress
Eudoxia, who united her influence with that of the ambitious Theophilus,
patriarch of Alexandria, and Chrysostom was banished from
Constantinople, but died on his way to the remote desert of Pityus. His
powerful sermons and valuable writings contributed in no small degree to
the spread of monasticism among the Christians of his time.

Then there was Augustine, the greatest thinker since Plato. "We shall
meet him," says Schaff, "alike on the broad highways and the narrow
foot-paths, on the giddy Alpine heights and in the awful depths of
speculation, wherever philosophical thinkers before him or after him
have trod." He, too, like all the other leaders of thought in his time,
was ascetic in his habits. Although he lived and labored for
thirty-eight years at Hippo, a Numidian city about two hundred miles
west of Carthage, in Africa, Augustine was regarded as the intellectual
head not only of North Africa but of Western Christianity. He gathered
his clergy into a college of priests, with a community of goods, thus
approaching as closely to the regular monastic life as was possible to
secular clergymen. He established religious houses and wrote a set of
rules, consisting of twenty-four articles, for the government of
monasteries. These rules were superseded by those of Benedict, but they