erently evil, and mind
was thought to be inherently good. The seat of evil was placed in the
body rather than in the heart and mind. Not the thoughts of men were
evil, but the passions and appetites of the body. Hence the first thing
for a good man to do was to bring the body--this seat of evil--under
subjection, and, if possible, to eradicate the passions and appetites
which enslave the body; and this was to be done by self-flagellations,
penances, austerities, and solitude,--flight from the contaminating
influences of the world. All Oriental piety assumed this ascetic form.
The transition was easy to the sundering of domestic ties, to the
suppression of natural emotions and social enjoyments. The devotee
became austere, cold, inhuman, unsocial. He shunned the habitations of
men. And the more desirous he was to essay a high religious life and
thus rise in favor with God, the more severe and revengeful and
unforgiving he made the Deity he adored,--not a compassionate Creator
and Father, but an irresistible Power bent on his destruction. This
degrading view of the Deity, borrowed from Paganism, tinged the
subsequent theology of the Christian monks, and entered largely into the
theology of the Middle Ages.

Such was the prevailing philosophy, or theosophy--both lofty and
degraded--with which the Christian convert had to contend; not merely
the shameless vices of the people, so open and flagrant as to call out
disgust and indignation, but also the views which the more virtuous and
religious of Pagan saints accepted and promulgated: and not saints
alone, but those who made the greatest pretension to intellectual
culture, like the Gnostics and Manicheans; those men who were the first
to ensnare Saint Augustine,--specious, subtle, sophistical, as acute as
the Brahmins of India. It was Eastern philosophy, false as we regard it,
which created the most powerful institution that existed in Europe for
above a thousand years,--an institution which all the learning and
eloquence of the Reformers of the sixteenth century could not subvert,
except in Protestant countries.

Now what, more specifically, were the ideas which the early monks
borrowed from India, Persia, and Egypt, which ultimately took such a
firm hold of the European mind?

One was the superior virtue of a life devoted to purely religious
contemplation, and for the same end that animated the existence of
fakirs and sofis. It was to escape the contaminating influence o