nd
implicit faith, with the exercise of their profession, the pursuit of
their interest, and the indulgence of their passions; but the ascetics,
who obeyed and abused the rigid precepts of the gospel, were inspired
by the severe enthusiasm which represents man as a criminal and God as
a tyrant. They seriously renounced the business and the pleasures of the
age; abjured the use of wine, of flesh, and of marriage, chastised their
body, mortified their affections, and embraced a life of misery, as
the price of eternal happiness. The ascetics fled from a profane and
degenerate world to perpetual solitude, or religious society. Like the
first Christians of Jerusalem, they resigned the use, or the property,
of their temporal possessions; established regular communities of the
same sex and a similar disposition, and assumed the names of hermits,
monks, or anchorites, expressive of their lonely retreat in a natural
or artificial desert. They soon acquired the respect of the world, which
they despised, and the loudest applause was bestowed on this divine
philosophy, which surpassed, without the aid of science or reason, the
laborious virtues of the Grecian schools. The monks might indeed contend
with the Stoics in the contempt of fortune, of pain, and of death;
the Pythagorean silence and submission were revived in their servile
discipline; and they disdained, as firmly as the Cynics themselves,
all the forms and decencies of civil society. But the votaries of this
divine philosophy aspired to imitate a purer and more perfect model.
They trod in the footsteps of the prophets, who had retired to the
desert; and they restored the devout and contemplative life, which
had been instituted by the Essenians, in Palestine and Egypt. The
philosophic eye of Pliny had surveyed with astonishment a solitary
people who dwelt among the palm trees near the Dead Sea; who subsisted
without money, who were propagated without women, and who derived from
the disgust and repentance of mankind a perpetual supply of voluntary
associates. Antony, an illiterate youth of the lower part of The-baid,
distributed his patrimony, deserted his family and native home, and
executed his monastic penance with original and intrepid fanaticism.
After a long and painful novitiate among the tombs and in a ruined
tower, he boldly advanced into the desert three days' journey to the
eastward of the Nile; discovered a lonely spot, which possessed the
advantages of shade and