d "chimeras dire." He could not escape from himself,
although he might fly from society. As a means of grace he sought
voluntary solitary confinement, without nutritious food or proper
protection from the heat and cold, clad in a sheepskin filled with dirt
and vermin. What life could be more antagonistic to enlightened reason?
What mistake more fatal to everything like self-improvement, culture,
knowledge, happiness? And all for what? To strive after an impossible
perfection, or the solution of insoluble questions, or the favor of a
Deity whose attributes he misunderstood.

But this unnatural, unwise retirement was not the worst evil in
the life of a primitive monk, with all its dreamy contemplation
and silent despair. It was accompanied with the most painful
austerities,--self-inflicted scourgings, lacerations, dire
privations, to propitiate an angry deity, or to bring the body
into a state which would be insensible to pain, or to exorcise
passions which the imaginations inflamed. All this was based on
penance,--self-expiation,--which entered so largely into the theogonies
of the East, and which gave a gloomy form to the piety of the Middle
Ages. This error was among the first to kindle the fiery protests of
Luther. The repudiation of this error, and of its logical sequences, was
one of the causes of the Reformation. This error cast its dismal shadow
on the common life of the Middle Ages. You cannot penetrate the spirit
of those centuries without a painful recognition of almost universal
darkness and despair. How gloomy was a Gothic church before the eleventh
century, with its dark and heavy crypt, its narrow windows, its massive
pillars, its low roof, its cold, damp pavement, as if men went into that
church to hide themselves and sing mournful songs,--the _Dies Irae_ of
monastic fear!

But the primitive monks, with all their lofty self-sacrifices and
efforts for holy meditation, towards the middle of the fourth century,
as their number increased from the anarchies and miseries of a falling
empire, became quarrelsome, sometimes turbulent, and generally fierce
and fanatical. They had to be governed. They needed some master mind to
control them, and confine them to their religious duties. Then arose
Basil, a great scholar, and accustomed to civilized life in the schools
of Athens and Constantinople, who gave rules and laws to the monks,
gathered them into communities and discouraged social isolation, knowing
that the d