it an indignity to be ruled by so young a man:
but the monastery throve and grew rapidly under his government. His
sweetness, patience, and humility, and above all, his marvellous
understanding of the doubts and temptations of his own generation, soon
drew around him all whose sensitiveness or waywardness had made them
unmanageable in the neighbouring monasteries. As to David in the
mountains, so to him, every one who was discontented, and every one
who was oppressed, gathered themselves. The neighbouring abbots were
at first inclined to shrink from him, as one who ate and drank with
publicans and sinners: but they held their peace, when they saw
those whom they had driven out as reprobates labouring peacefully and
cheerfully under Philammon. The elder generation of Scetis, too, saw,
with some horror, the new influx of sinners: but their abbot had but
one answer to their remonstrances--'Those who are whole need not a
physician, but those who are sick.'

Never was the young abbot heard to speak harshly of any human being.
'When thou halt tried in vain for seven years,' he used to say, 'to
convert a sinner, then only wilt thou have a right to suspect him of
being a worse man than thyself.' That there is a seed of good in all
men, a Divine Word and Spirit striving with all men, a gospel and good
news which would turn the hearts of all men, if abbots and priests could
but preach it aright, was his favourite doctrine, and one which he used
to defend, when, at rare intervals, he allowed himself to discuss
any subject from the writings of his favourite theologian, Clement
of Alexandria. Above all, he stopped, by stern rebuke, any attempt to
revile either heretics or heathens. 'On the Catholic Church alone,' he
used to say, 'lies the blame of all heresy and unbelief: for if she were
but for one day that which she ought to be, the world would be converted
before nightfall.' To one class of sins, indeed, he was inexorable--all
but ferocious; to the sins, namely, of religious persons. In proportion
to any man's reputation for orthodoxy and sanctity, Philammon's judgment
of him was stern and pitiless. More than once events proved him to
have been unjust: when he saw himself to be so, none could confess his
mistake more frankly, or humiliate himself for it more bitterly: but
from his rule he never swerved; and the Pharisees of the Nile dreaded
and avoided him, as much as the publicans and sinners loved and followed
him.

One thing