en were tired of the
reality; it involves no sense of sin. If sin could be
indulged without weakening our self-command, or without
hurting other people, Roman philosophy would have
nothing to say against it.

The Christians stepped far out beyond philosophy;
without speculating on the why, they felt that indulgence
of animal passion did, in fact, pollute them,
and so much the more, the more it was deliberate.
Philosophy, gliding into Manicheism, divided the forces
of the universe, giving the spirit to God, but declaring
matter to be eternally and incurably evil; and looking
forward to the time when the spirit should be emancipated
from the body, as the beginning of, or as the
return to, its proper existence, took no especial care
what became the meanwhile of its evil tenement of
flesh. If it sinned, sin was its element; it could
not do other than sin; purity of conduct could not
make the body clean, and no amount of bodily
indulgence could shed a taint upon the spirit--a very
comfortable doctrine, and one which, under various
disguises, has appeared a good many times on the
earth. But Christianity, shaking it all off, would
present the body to God as a pure and holy sacrifice,
as so much of the material world conquered from the
appetites and lusts, and from the devil whose abode
they were. This was the meaning of the fastings and
scourgings, the penances and night-watchings; it was
this which sent St. Anthony to the tombs and set
Simeon on his pillar, to conquer the devil in the flesh,
and keep themselves, if possible, undefiled by so much
as one corrupt thought.

And they may have been absurd and extravagant;
when the feeling is stronger than the judgment, men
are very apt to be so. If, in the recoil from
Manicheism, they conceived that a body of a saint
thus purified had contracted supernatural virtue and
could work miracles, they had not sufficiently attended
to the facts, and so far are not unexceptionable witnesses
to them. Nevertheless they did their work, and in
virtue of it we are raised to a higher stage, we are lifted
forward a mighty step which we can never again retrace.
Personal purity is not the whole for which we have to
care, it is but one feature in the ideal character of man.
The monks may have thought it was all, or more nearly
all than it is; and therefore their lives may seem to us
poor, mean, and emasculate. Yet it is with life as it is
with science; generations of men have given themse