call him, though he did not receive this
appellation until some centuries after his death) was soon disgusted and
disappointed with the ordinary avocations of the Forum,--its low
standard of virtue, and its diversion of what is ennobling in the pure
fountains of natural justice into the turbid and polluted channels of
deceit, chicanery, and fraud; its abandonment to usurious calculations
and tricks of learned and legalized jugglery, by which the end of law
itself was baffled and its advocates alone enriched. But what else could
be expected of lawyers in those days and in that wicked city, or even in
any city of the whole Empire, when justice was practically a marketable
commodity; when one half of the whole population were slaves; when the
circus and the theatre were as necessary as the bath; when only the rich
and fortunate were held in honor; when provincial governments were sold
to the highest bidder; when effeminate favorites were the grand
chamberlains of emperors; when fanatical mobs rendered all order a
mockery; when the greed for money was the master passion of the people;
when utility was the watchword of philosophy, and material gains the end
and object of education; when public misfortunes were treated with the
levity of atheistic science; when private sorrows, miseries, and
sufferings had no retreat and no shelter; when conjugal infelicities
were scarcely a reproach; when divorces were granted on the most
frivolous pretexts; when men became monks from despair of finding women
of virtue for wives; and when everything indicated a rapid approach of
some grand catastrophe which should mingle, in indiscriminate ruin, the
masters and the slaves of a corrupt and prostrate world?

Such was society, and such the signs of the times, when Chrysostom began
the practice of the law at Antioch,--perhaps the wickedest city of the
whole Empire. His eyes speedily were opened. He could not sleep, for
grief and disgust; he could not embark on a profession which then, at
least, added to the evils it professed to cure; he began to tremble for
his higher interests; he abandoned the Forum forever; he fled as from a
city of destruction; he sought solitude, meditation, and prayer, and
joined those monks who lived in cells, beyond the precincts of the
doomed city. The ardent, the enthusiastic, the cultivated, the
conscientious, the lofty Chrysostom fraternized with the visionary
inhabitants of the desert, speculated with them on the my