ought that the active business in
which bishops and other clergy were obliged to engage, would hinder
their reaching to the higher degrees of holiness. Thus a famous monk,
named Ammonius, on being chosen for a bishopric, cut off one of his
ears, thinking that this blemish would prevent his being made a priest,
as it would have done under the law of Moses (_Lev._ xxi. 17-23); and
when he was told that it was not so in the Christian Church, he
threatened to cut out his tongue.

It was not long before the sight of the great respect which was paid to
the monks led many worthless people to call themselves monks for the
sake of what they might get by doing so. These fellows used to go about,
wearing heavy chains, uncouthly dressed, and behaving roughly; and they
told outrageous stories of visions and of fights with devils which they
pretended to have had. By such tricks they got large sums of money from
people who were foolish enough to encourage them; and they spent it in
the most shameful ways.

But besides these vile hypocrites, many monks who seem to have been
sincere enough ran into very strange extravagances. There was one kind
of them called _Grazers_, who used to live among mountains, without any
roof to shelter them, browsing, like beasts, on grass and herbs, and by
degrees growing much more like beasts than men. And in the beginning of
the fifth century, one Symeon founded a new sort of monks, who were
called _Stylites_ (that is to say, _pillar saints_), from a Greek word,
which means a pillar. Symeon was a Syrian, and lived on the top of one
pillar after another for seven-and-thirty years. Each pillar was higher
than the one before it; the height of the last of them was forty cubits
(or seventy feet), and the top of it was only a yard across. There
Symeon was to be seen, with a heavy iron chain round his neck, and great
numbers of people flocked to visit him; some of them even went all the
way from our own country. And when he was dead, a monk, named Daniel,
got the old cowl which he had worn, and built himself a pillar near
Constantinople, where he lived three-and-thirty years. The high winds
sometimes almost blew him from his place, and sometimes he was covered
for days with snow and ice, until the emperor Leo made him submit to let
a shed be built round the top of his pillar. The fame and influence
which these monks gained were immense. They were supposed to have the
power of prophecy and of miracles; they were