The influence of Christianity upon slavery, by inclining the moral type to

the servile classes, though less obvious and less discussed than some

others, is, I believe, in the very highest degree important. There is,

probably, scarcely any other single circumstance that exercises so

profound an influence upon the social and political relations of a

religion, as the class type with which it can most readily assimilate; or,

in other words, the group or variety of virtues to which it gives the

foremost place. The virtues that are most suited to the servile position

were in general so little honoured by antiquity that they were not even

cultivated in their appropriate sphere. The aspirations of good men were

in a different direction. The virtue of the Stoic, which rose triumphantly

under adversity, nearly always withered under degradation. For the first

time, under the influence of Christianity, a great moral movement passed

through the servile class. The multitude of slaves who embraced the new

faith was one of the reproaches of the Pagans; and the names of Blandina,

Potamiæna, Eutyches, Victorinus, and Nereus, show how fully they shared in

the sufferings and in the glory of martyrdom (132). The first and grandest

edifice of Byzantine architecture in Italy—the noble church of St. Vital,

at Ravenna—was dedicated by Justinian to the memory of a martyred slave.

While Christianity thus broke down the contempt with which the master had

regarded his slaves, and planted among the latter a principle of moral

regeneration which expanded in no other sphere with an equal perfection,

its action in procuring the freedom of the slave was unceasing. The law of

Constantine, which placed the ceremony under the superintendence of the

clergy, and the many laws that gave special facilities of manumission to

those who desired to enter the monasteries or the priesthood, symbolised

the religious character the act had assumed. It was celebrated on Church

festivals, especially at Easter; and, although it was not proclaimed a

matter of duty or necessity, it was always regarded as one of the most

acceptable modes of expiating past sins. St. Melania was said to have

emancipated 8,000 slaves; St. Ovidius, a rich martyr of Gaul, 5,000;

Chromatius, a Roman prefect under Diocletian, 1,400; Hermes, a prefect in

the reign of Trajan, 1,250.(133) Pope St. Gregory, many of the clergy at

Hippo under the rule of St. Augustine, as well as great numbers of private

individuals, freed their slaves as an act of piety.(134) It became

customary to do so on occasions of national or personal thanksgiving, on

recovery from sickness, on the birth of a child, at the hour of death,

and, above all, in testamentary bequests.(135) Numerous charters and

epitaphs still record the gift of liberty to slaves throughout the middle

ages, “for the benefit of the soul” of the donor or testator. In the

thirteenth century, when there were no slaves to emancipate in France, it

was usual in many churches to release caged pigeons on the ecclesiastical

festivals, in memory of the ancient charity, and that prisoners might

still be freed in the name of Christ.(136)

Slavery, however, lasted in Europe for about 800 years after Constantine,

and during the period with which alone this volume is concerned, although

its character was changed and mitigated, the number of men who were

subject to it was probably greater than in the Pagan Empire. In the West

the barbarian conquests modified the conditions of labour in two

directions. The cessation of the stream of barbarian captives, the

impoverishment of great families, who had been surrounded by vast retinues

of slaves, the general diminution of town life, and the barbarian habits

of personal independence, checked the old form of slavery, while the

misery and the precarious condition of the free peasants induced them in

great numbers to barter their liberty for protection by the neighbouring

lord.(137) In the East, the destruction of great fortunes through

excessive taxation diminished the number of superfluous slaves; and the

fiscal system of the Byzantine Empire, by which agricultural slaves were

taxed according to their employments,(138) as well as the desire of

emperors to encourage agriculture, led the legislators to attach the

slaves permanently to the soil. In the course of time, almost the entire

free peasantry, and the greater number of the old slaves, had sunk or

risen into the qualified slavery called serfdom, which formed the basis of

the great edifice of feudalism. Towards the end of the eighth century, the

sale of slaves beyond their native provinces was in most countries

prohibited.(139) The creation of the free cities of Italy, the custom of

emancipating slaves who were enrolled in the army, and economical changes

which made free labour more profitable than slave labour, conspired with

religious motives in effecting the ultimate freedom of labour. The

practice of manumitting, as an act of devotion, continued to the end; but

the ecclesiastics, probably through the feeling that they had no right to

alienate corporate property, in which they had only a life interest, were

among the last to follow the counsels they so liberally bestowed upon the

laity.(140) In the twelfth century, however, slaves in Europe were very

rare. In the fourteenth century, slavery was almost unknown.(141)

Closely connected with the influence of the Church in destroying

hereditary slavery, was its influence in redeeming captives from

servitude. In no other form of charity was its beneficial character more

continually and more splendidly displayed. During the long and dreary

trials of the barbarian invasions, when the whole structure of society was

dislocated, when vast districts and mighty cities were in a few months

almost depopulated, and when the flower of the youth of Italy were mown

down by the sword, or carried away into captivity, the bishops never

desisted from their efforts to alleviate the sufferings of the prisoners.

St. Ambrose, disregarding the outcries of the Arians, who denounced his

act as atrocious sacrilege, sold the rich church ornaments of Milan to

rescue some captives who had fallen into the hands of the Goths, and this

practice—which was afterwards formally sanctioned by St. Gregory the

Great—became speedily general. When the Roman army had captured, but

refused to support, seven thousand Persian prisoners, Acacius, Bishop of

Amida, undeterred by the bitter hostility of the Persians to Christianity,

and declaring that “God had no need of plates or dishes,” sold all the

rich church ornaments of his diocese, rescued the unbelieving prisoners,

and sent them back unharmed to their king. During the horrors of the

Vandal invasion, Deogratias, Bishop of Carthage, took a similar step to

ransom the Roman prisoners. St. Augustine, St. Gregory the Great, St.

Cæsarius of Arles, St. Exuperius of Toulouse, St. Hilary, St. Remi, all

melted down or sold their church vases to free prisoners. St. Cyprian sent

a large sum for the same purpose to the Bishop of Nicomedia. St.

Epiphanius and St. Avitus, in conjunction with a rich Gaulish lady named

Syagria, are said to have rescued thousands. St. Eligius devoted to this

object his entire fortune. St. Paulinus of Nola displayed a similar

generosity, and the legends even assert, though untruly, that he, like St.

Peter Teleonarius and St. Serapion, having exhausted all other forms of

charity, as a last gift sold himself to slavery. When, long afterwards,

the Mohammedan conquests in a measure reproduced the calamities of the

barbarian invasions, the same unwearied charity was displayed. The

Trinitarian monks, founded by John of Matha in the twelfth century, were

devoted to the release of Christian captives, and another society was

founded with the same object by Peter Nolasco, in the following

century.(142)

The different branches of the subject I am examining are so closely

intertwined that it is difficult to investigate one without in a measure

anticipating the others. While discussing the influence of the Church in

protecting infancy, in raising the estimate of human life, and in

alleviating slavery, I have trenched largely upon the last application of

the doctrine of Christian fraternity I must examine—I mean the foundation

of charity. The difference between Pagan and Christian societies in this

matter is very profound; but a great part of it must be ascribed to causes

other than religious opinions. Charity finds an extended scope for action

only, where there exists a large class of men at once independent and

impoverished. In the ancient societies, slavery in a great measure

replaced pauperism, and, by securing the subsistence of a very large

proportion of the poor, contracted the sphere of charity. And what slavery

did at Rome for the very poor, the system of clientage did for those of a

somewhat higher rank. The existence of these two institutions is

sufficient to show the injustice of judging the two societies by a mere

comparison of their charitable institutions, and we must also remember

that among the ancients the relief of the indigent was one of the most

important functions of the State. Not to dwell upon the many measures

taken with this object in ancient Greece, in considering the condition of

the Roman poor we are at once met by the simple fact that for several

centuries the immense majority of these were habitually supported by

gratuitous distributions of corn. In a very early period of Roman history

we find occasional instances of distribution; but it was not till A.U.C.

630 that Caius Gracchus caused a law to be made, supplying the poorer

classes with corn at a price that was little more than nominal; and

although, two years after, the nobles succeeded in revoking this law, it

was after several fluctuations finally re-enacted in A.U.C. 679. The

Cassia-Terentia law, as it was called from the consuls under whom it was

at last established, was largely extended in its operation, or, as some

think, revived from neglect in A.U.C. 691, by Cato of Utica, who desired

by this means to divert popularity from the cause of Cæsar, under whom

multitudes of the poor were enrolling themselves. Four years later,

Clodius Pulcher, abolishing the small payment which had been demanded,

made the distribution entirely gratuitous. It took place once a month, and

consisted of five modii(143) a head. In the time of Julius Cæsar no less

than 320,000 persons were inscribed as recipients; but Cæsar reduced the

number by one half. Under Augustus it had risen to 200,000. This emperor

desired to restrict the distribution of corn to three or four times a

year, but, yielding to the popular wish, he at last consented that it

should continue monthly. It soon became the leading fact of Roman life.

Numerous officers were appointed to provide it. A severe legislation

controlled their acts, and to secure a regular and abundant supply of corn

for the capital became the principal object of the provincial governors.

Under the Antonines the number of the recipients had considerably

increased, having sometimes, it is said, exceeded 500,000. Septimus

Severus added to the corn a ration of oil. Aurelian replaced the monthly

distribution of unground corn by a daily distribution of bread, and added,

moreover, a portion of pork. Gratuitous distributions were afterwards

extended to Constantinople, Alexandria, and Antioch, and were probably not

altogether unknown in smaller towns.(144)

We have already seen that this gratuitous distribution of corn ranked,

with the institution of slavery and the gladiatorial exhibitions, as one

of the chief demoralising influences of the Empire. The most injudicious

charity, however pernicious to the classes it is intended to relieve, has

commonly a beneficial and softening influence upon the donor, and through

him upon society at large. But the Roman distribution of corn, being

merely a political device, had no humanising influence upon the people,

while, being regulated only by the indigence, and not at all by the

infirmities or character, of the recipient, it was a direct and

overwhelming encouragement to idleness. With a provision of the

necessaries of life, and with an abundant supply of amusements, the poor

Romans readily gave up honourable labour, all trades in the city

languished, every interruption in the distribution of corn was followed by

fearful sufferings, free gifts of land were often insufficient to attract

the citizens to honest labour, and the multiplication of children, which

rendered the public relief inadequate, was checked by abortion,

exposition, or infanticide.

When we remember that the population of Rome probably never exceeded a

million and a half, that a large proportion of the indigent were provided

for as slaves, and that more than 200,000 freemen were habitually supplied

with the first necessary of life, we cannot, I think, charge the Pagan

society of the metropolis, at least, with an excessive parsimony in

relieving poverty. But besides the distribution of corn, several other

measures were taken. Salt, which was very largely used by the Roman poor,

had during the Republic been made a monopoly of the State, and was sold by

it at a price that was little more than nominal.(145) The distribution of

land, which was the subject of the agrarian laws, was, under a new form,

practised by Julius Cæsar,(146) Nerva,(147) and Septimus Severus,(148) who

bought land to divide it among the poor citizens. Large legacies were left

to the people by Julius Cæsar, Augustus, and others, and considerable,

though irregular, donations made on occasions of great rejoicings.

Numerous public baths were established, to which, when they were not

absolutely gratuitous, the smallest coin in use gave admission, and which

were in consequence habitually employed by the poor. Vespasian instituted,

and the Antonines extended, a system of popular education, and the

movement I have already noticed, for the support of the children of poor

parents, acquired very considerable proportions. The first trace of it at

Rome may be found under Augustus, who gave money and corn for the support

of young children, who had previously not been included in the public

distributions.(149) This appears, however, to have been but an act of

isolated benevolence, and the honour of first instituting a systematic

effort in this direction belongs to Nerva, who enjoined the support of

poor children, not only in Rome, but in all the cities of Italy.(150)

Trajan greatly extended the system. In his reign 5,000 poor children were

supported by the Government in Rome alone,(151) and similar measures,

though we know not on what scale, were taken in the other Italian and even

African cities. At the little town of Velleia, we find a charity

instituted by Trajan, for the partial support of 270 children.(152)

Private benevolence followed in the same direction, and several

inscriptions which still remain, though they do not enable us to write its

history, sufficiently attest its activity. The younger Pliny, besides

warmly encouraging schools, devoted a small property to the support of

poor children in his native city of Como.(153) The name of Cælia Macrina

is preserved as the foundress of a charity for 100 children at

Terracina.(154) Hadrian increased the supplies of corn allotted to these

charities, and he was also distinguished for his bounty to poor

women.(155) Antoninus was accustomed to lend money to the poor at four per

cent., which was much below the normal rate of interest,(156) and both he

and Marcus Aurelius dedicated to the memory of their wives institutions

for the support of girls.(157) Alexander Severus in like manner dedicated

an institution for the support of children to the memory of his

mother.(158) Public hospitals were probably unknown in Europe before

Christianity; but there are traces of the distribution of medicine to the

sick poor;(159) there were private infirmaries for slaves, and also, it is

believed, military hospitals.(160) Provincial towns were occasionally

assisted by the Government in seasons of great distress, and there are

some recorded instances of private legacies for their benefit.(161)

These various measures are by no means inconsiderable, and it is not

unreasonable to suppose that many similar steps were taken, of which all

record has been lost. The history of charity presents so few salient

features, so little that can strike the imagination or arrest the

attention, that it is usually almost wholly neglected by historians; and

it is easy to conceive what inadequate notions of our existing charities

could be gleaned from the casual allusions in plays or poems, in political

histories or court memoirs. There can, however, be no question that

neither in practice nor in theory, neither in the institutions that were

founded nor in the place that was assigned to it in the scale of duties,

did charity in antiquity occupy a position at all comparable to that which

it has obtained by Christianity. Nearly all relief was a State measure,

dictated much more by policy than by benevolence; and the habit of selling

young children, the innumerable expositions, the readiness of the poor to

enrol themselves as gladiators, and the frequent famines, show how large

was the measure of unrelieved distress. A very few Pagan examples of

charity have, indeed, descended to us. Among the Greeks we find

Epaminondas ransoming captives, and collecting dowers for poor girls;(162)

Cimon, feeding the hungry and clothing the naked;(163) Bias, purchasing,

emancipating, and furnishing with dowers some captive girls of

Messina.(164) Tacitus has described with enthusiasm how, after a

catastrophe near Rome, the rich threw open their houses and taxed all

their resources to relieve the sufferers.(165) There existed, too, among

the poor, both of Greece and Rome, mutual insurance societies, which

undertook to provide for their sick and infirm members.(166) The very

frequent reference to mendicancy in the Latin writers shows that beggars,

and therefore those who relieved beggars, were numerous. The duty of

hospitality was also strongly enjoined, and was placed under the special

protection of the supreme Deity. But the active, habitual, and detailed

charity of private persons, which is so conspicuous a feature in all

Christian societies, was scarcely known in antiquity, and there are not

more than two or three moralists who have even noticed it. Of these, the

chief rank belongs to Cicero, who devoted two very judicious but somewhat

cold chapters to the subject. Nothing, he said, is more suitable to the

nature of man than beneficence or liberality, but there are many cautions

to be urged in practising it. We must take care that our bounty is a real

blessing to the person we relieve; that it does not exceed our own means;

that it is not, as was the case with Sylla and Cæsar, derived from the

spoliation of others; that it springs from the heart and not from

ostentation; that the claims of gratitude are preferred to the mere

impulses of compassion, and that due regard is paid both to the character

and to the wants of the recipient.(167)

Christianity for the first time made charity a rudimentary virtue, giving

it a leading place in the moral type, and in the exhortations of its

teachers. Besides its general influence in stimulating the affections, it

effected a complete revolution in this sphere, by regarding the poor as

the special representatives of the Christian Founder, and thus making the

love of Christ, rather than the love of man, the principle of charity.

Even in the days of persecution, collections for the relief of the poor

were made at the Sunday meetings. The agapæ or feasts of love were

intended mainly for the poor, and food that was saved by the fasts was

devoted to their benefit. A vast organisation of charity, presided over by

the bishops, and actively directed by the deacons, soon ramified over

Christendom, till the bond of charity became the bond of unity, and the

most distant sections of the Christian Church corresponded by the

interchange of mercy. Long before the era of Constantine, it was observed

that the charities of the Christians were so extensive—it may, perhaps, be

said so excessive—that they drew very many impostors to the Church;(168)

and when the victory of Christianity was achieved, the enthusiasm for

charity displayed itself in the erection of numerous institutions that

were altogether unknown to the Pagan world. A Roman lady, named Fabiola,

in the fourth century, founded at Rome, as an act of penance, the first

public hospital, and the charity planted by that woman’s hand overspread

the world, and will alleviate, to the end of time, the darkest anguish of

humanity. Another hospital was soon after founded by St. Pammachus;

another of great celebrity by St. Basil, at Cæsarea. St. Basil also

erected at Cæsarea what was probably the first asylum for lepers.

Xenodochia, or refuges for strangers, speedily rose, especially along the

paths of the pilgrims. St. Pammachus founded one at Ostia; Paula and

Melania founded others at Jerusalem. The Council of Nice ordered that one

should be erected in every city. In the time of St. Chrysostom the church

of Antioch supported 3,000 widows and virgins, besides strangers and sick.

Legacies for the poor became common; and it was not unfrequent for men and

women who desired to live a life of peculiar sanctity, and especially for

priests who attained the episcopacy to bestow their entire properties in

charity. Even the early Oriental monks, who for the most part were

extremely removed from the active and social virtues, supplied many noble

examples of charity. St. Ephrem, in a time of pestilence, emerged from his

solitude to found and superintend a hospital at Edessa. A monk named

Thalasius collected blind beggars in an asylum on the banks of the

Euphrates. A merchant named Apollonius founded on Mount Nitria a

gratuitous dispensary for the monks. The monks often assisted by their

labours provinces that were suffering from pestilence or famine. We may

trace the remains of the pure socialism that marked the first phase of the

Christian community, in the emphatic language with which some of the

Fathers proclaimed charity to be a matter not of mercy but of justice,

maintaining that all property is based on usurpation, that the earth by

right is common to all men, and that no man can claim a superabundant

supply of its goods except as an administrator for others. A Christian, it

was maintained, should devote at least one-tenth of his profits to the

poor.(169)

The enthusiasm of charity, thus manifested in the Church, speedily

attracted the attention of the Pagans. The ridicule of Lucian, and the

vain efforts of Julian to produce a rival system of charity within the

limits of Paganism,(170) emphatically attested both its pre-eminence and

its catholicity. During the pestilences that desolated Carthage in A.D.

326, and Alexandria in the reigns of Gallienus and of Maximian, while the

Pagans fled panic-stricken from the contagion, the Christians extorted the

admiration of their fellow-countrymen by the courage with which they

rallied around their bishops, consoled the last hours of the sufferers,

and buried the abandoned dead.(171) In the rapid increase of pauperism

arising from the emancipation of numerous slaves, their charity found free

scope for action, and its resources were soon taxed to the utmost by the

horrors of the barbarian invasions. The conquest of Africa by Genseric

deprived Italy of the supply of corn upon which it almost wholly depended,

arrested the gratuitous distribution by which the Roman poor were mainly

supported, and produced all over the land the most appalling

calamities.(172) The history of Italy became one monotonous tale of famine

and pestilence, of starving populations and ruined cities. But everywhere

amid this chaos of dissolution we may detect the majestic form of the

Christian priest mediating between the hostile forces, straining every

nerve to lighten the calamities around him. When the Imperial city was

captured and plundered by the hosts of Alaric, a Christian church remained

a secure sanctuary, which neither the passions nor the avarice of the

Goths transgressed. When a fiercer than Alaric had marked out Rome for his

prey, the Pope St. Leo, arrayed in his sacerdotal robes, confronted the

victorious Hun, as the ambassador of his fellow-countrymen, and Attila,

overpowered by religious awe, turned aside in his course. When, two years

later, Rome lay at the mercy of Genseric, the same Pope interposed with

the Vandal conqueror, and obtained from him a partial cessation of the

massacre. The Archdeacon Pelagius interceded with similar humanity and

similar success, when Rome had been captured by Totila. In Gaul, Troyes is

said to have been saved from destruction by the influence of St. Lupus,

and Orleans by the influence of St. Agnan. In Britain an invasion of the

Picts was averted by St. Germain of Auxerre. The relations of rulers to

their subjects, and of tribunals to the poor, were modified by the same

intervention. When Antioch was threatened with destruction on account of

its rebellion against Theodosius, the anchorites poured forth from the

neighbouring deserts to intercede with the ministers of the emperor, while

the Archbishop Flavian went himself as a suppliant to Constantinople. St.

Ambrose imposed public penance on Theodosius, on account of the massacre

of Thessalonica. Synesius excommunicated for his oppressions a governor

named Andronicus; and two French Councils, in the sixth century, imposed

the same penalty on all great men who arbitrarily ejected the poor.

Special laws were found necessary to restrain the turbulent charity of

some priests and monks, who impeded the course of justice, and even

snatched criminals from the hands of the law.(173) St. Abraham, St.

Epiphanius, and St. Basil are all said to have obtained the remission or

reduction of oppressive imposts. To provide for the interests of widows

and orphans was part of the official ecclesiastical duty, and a Council of

Macon anathematised any ruler who brought them to trial without first

apprising the bishop of the diocese. A Council of Toledo, in the fifth

century, threatened with excommunication all who robbed priests, monks, or

poor men, or refused to listen to their expostulations. One of the chief

causes of the inordinate power acquired by the clergy was their

mediatorial office, and their gigantic wealth was in a great degree due to

the legacies of those who regarded them as the trustees of the poor. As

time rolled on, charity assumed many forms, and every monastery became a

centre from which it radiated. By the monks the nobles were overawed, the

poor protected, the sick tended, travellers sheltered, prisoners ransomed,

the remotest spheres of suffering explored. During the darkest period of

the middle ages, monks founded a refuge for pilgrims amid the horrors of

the Alpine snows. A solitary hermit often planted himself, with his little

boat, by a bridgeless stream, and the charity of his life was to ferry

over the traveller.(174) When the hideous disease of leprosy extended its

ravages over Europe, when the minds of men were filled with terror, not

only by its loathsomeness and its contagion, but also by the notion that

it was in a peculiar sense supernatural,(175) new hospitals and refuges

overspread Europe, and monks flocked in multitudes to serve in them.(176)

Sometimes, the legends say, the leper’s form was in a moment transfigured,

and he who came to tend the most loathsome of mankind received his reward,

for he found himself in the presence of his Lord.

There is no fact of which an historian becomes more speedily or more

painfully conscious than the great difference between the importance and

the dramatic interest of the subjects he treats. Wars or massacres, the

horrors of martyrdom or the splendours of individual prowess, are

susceptible of such brilliant colouring, that with but little literary

skill they can be so pourtrayed that their importance is adequately

realised, and they appeal powerfully to the emotions of the reader. But

this vast and unostentatious movement of charity, operating in the village

hamlet and in the lonely hospital, staunching the widow’s tears, and

following all the windings of the poor man’s griefs, presents few features

the imagination can grasp, and leaves no deep impression upon the mind.

The greatest things are often those which are most imperfectly realised;

and surely no achievements of the Christian Church are more truly great

than those which it has effected in the sphere of charity. For the first

time in the history of mankind, it has inspired many thousands of men and

women, at the sacrifice of all worldly interests, and often under

circumstances of extreme discomfort or danger, to devote their entire

lives to the single object of assuaging the sufferings of humanity. It has

covered the globe with countless institutions of mercy, absolutely unknown

to the whole Pagan world. It has indissolubly united, in the minds of men,

the idea of supreme goodness with that of active and constant benevolence.

It has placed in every parish a religious minister, who, whatever may be

his other functions, has at least been officially charged with the

superintendence of an organisation of charity, and who finds in this

office one of the most important as well as one of the most legitimate

sources of his power.

There are, however, two important qualifications to the admiration with

which we regard the history of Christian charity—one relating to a

particular form of suffering, and the other of a more general kind. A

strong, ill-defined notion of the supernatural character of insanity had

existed from the earliest times; but there were special circumstances

which rendered the action of the Church peculiarly unfavourable to those

who were either predisposed to or afflicted with this calamity. The

reality both of witchcraft and diabolical possession had been distinctly

recognised in the Jewish writings. The received opinions about eternal

torture, and ever-present dæmons, and the continued strain upon the

imagination, in dwelling upon an unseen world, were pre-eminently fitted

to produce madness in those who were at all predisposed to it, and, where

insanity had actually appeared, to determine the form and complexion of

the hallucinations of the maniac.(177) Theology supplying all the images

that acted most powerfully upon the imagination, most madness, for many

centuries, took a theological cast. One important department of it appears

chiefly in the lives of the saints. Men of lively imaginations and

absolute ignorance, living apart from all their fellows, amid the horrors

of a savage wilderness, practising austerities by which their physical

system was thoroughly deranged, and firmly persuaded that innumerable

devils were continually hovering about their cells and interfering with

their devotions, speedily and very naturally became subject to constant

hallucinations, which probably form the nucleus of truth in the legends of

their lives. But it was impossible that insanity should confine itself to

the orthodox forms of celestial visions, or of the apparitions and the

defeats of devils. Very frequently it led the unhappy maniac to some

delusion, which called down upon him the speedy sentence of the Church.

Thus, in the year 1300, the corpse of a Bohemian or, according to another

version, an English girl who imagined herself to be the Holy Ghost

incarnate for the redemption of women, was dug up and burnt, and two women

who believed in her perished at the stake.(178) In the year 1359, a

Spaniard declared himself to be the brother of the archangel Michael, and

to be destined for the place in heaven which Satan had lost; and he added

that he was accustomed every day both to mount into heaven and descend

into hell, that the end of the world was at hand, and that it was reserved

for him to enter into single combat with Antichrist. The poor lunatic fell

into the hands of the Archbishop of Toledo, and was burnt alive.(179) In

some cases the hallucination took the form of an irregular inspiration. On

this charge, Joan of Arc, and another girl who had been fired by her

example, and had endeavoured, apparently under a genuine hallucination, to

follow her career,(180) were burnt alive. A famous Spanish physician and

scholar, named Torralba, who lived in the sixteenth century, and who

imagined that he had an attendant angel continually about him, escaped

with public penance and confession;(181) but a professor of theology in

Lima, who laboured under the same delusion, and added to it some wild

notions about his spiritual dignities, was less fortunate. He was burnt by

the Inquisition of Peru.(182) Most commonly, however, the theological

notions about witchcraft either produced madness or determined its form,

and, through the influence of the clergy of the different sections of the

Christian Church, many thousands of unhappy women, who, from their age,

their loneliness, and their infirmity, were most deserving of pity, were

devoted to the hatred of mankind, and, having been tortured with horrible

and ingenious cruelty, were at last burnt alive.

The existence, however, of some forms of natural madness was generally

admitted; but the measures for the relief of the unhappy victims were very

few, and very ill judged. Among the ancients, they were brought to the

temples, and subjected to imposing ceremonies, which were believed

supernaturally to relieve them, and which probably had a favourable

influence through their action upon the imagination. The great Greek

physicians had devoted considerable attention to this malady, and some of

their precepts anticipated modern discoveries; but no lunatic asylum

appears to have existed in antiquity.(183) In the first period of the

hermit life, when many anchorites became insane through their penances, a

refuge is said to have been opened for them at Jerusalem.(184) This

appears, however, to be a solitary instance, arising from the exigencies

of a single class, and no lunatic asylum existed in Christian Europe till

the fifteenth century. The Mohammedans, in this form of charity, seem to

have preceded the Christians. Benjamin of Tudela, who visited Bagdad in

the twelfth century, describes a palace in that city, called “the House of

Mercy,” in which all mad persons found in the country were confined and

bound with iron chains. They were carefully examined every month and

released as soon as they recovered.(185) The asylum of Cairo is said to

have been founded in A.D. 1304.(186) Leo Africanus notices the existence

of a similar institution at Fez, in the beginning of the sixteenth

century, and mentions that the patients were restrained by chains,(187)

and it is probable that the care of the insane was a general form of

charity in Mohammedan countries. Among the Christians it first appeared in

quarters contiguous to the Mohammedans; but there is, I think, no real

evidence that it was derived from Mohammedan example. The Knights of Malta

were famous as the one order who admitted lunatics into their hospitals;

but no Christian asylum expressly for their benefit existed till 1409. The

honour of instituting this form of charity in Christendom belongs to

Spain. A monk named Juan Gilaberto Joffre, filled with compassion at the

sight of the maniacs who were hooted by crowds through the streets of

Valencia, founded an asylum in that city, and his example was speedily

followed in other provinces. The new charity was introduced into Saragossa

in A.D. 1425, into Seville and Valladolid in A.D. 1436, into Toledo in

A.D. 1483. All these institutions existed before a single lunatic asylum

had been founded in any other part of Christendom.(188) Two other very

honourable facts may be mentioned, establishing the preeminence of Spanish

charity in this field. The first is, that the oldest lunatic asylum in the

metropolis of Catholicism was that erected by Spaniards, in A.D.

1548.(189) The second is, that when, at the close of the last century,

Pinel began his great labours in this sphere, he pronounced Spain to be

the country in which lunatics were treated with most wisdom and most

humanity.(190)

In most countries their condition was indeed truly deplorable. While many

thousands were burnt as witches, those who were recognised as insane were

compelled to endure all the horrors of the harshest imprisonment. Blows,

bleeding, and chains were their usual treatment, and horrible accounts

were given of madmen who had spent decades bound in dark cells.(191) Such

treatment naturally aggravated their malady, and that malady in many cases

rendered impossible the resignation and ultimate torpor which alleviate

the sufferings of ordinary prisoners. Not until the eighteenth century was

the condition of this unhappy class seriously improved. The combined

progress of theological scepticism and scientific knowledge relegated

witchcraft to the world of phantoms, and the exertions of Morgagni in

Italy, of Cullen in Scotland, and of Pinel in France, renovated the whole

treatment of acknowledged lunatics.

The second qualification to the admiration with which we regard the

history of Christian charity arises from the undoubted fact that a large

proportion of charitable institutions have directly increased the poverty

they were intended to relieve. The question of the utility and nature of

charity is one which, since the modern discoveries of political economy,

has elicited much discussion, and in many cases, I think, much

exaggeration. What political economy has effected on the subject may be

comprised under two heads. It has elucidated more clearly, and in greater

detail than had before been done, the effect of provident self-interest in

determining the welfare of societies, and it has established a broad

distinction between productive and unproductive expenditure. It has shown

that, where idleness is supported, idleness will become common; that,

where systematic public provision is made for old age, the parsimony of

foresight will be neglected; and that therefore these forms of charity, by

encouraging habits of idleness and improvidence, ultimately increase the

wretchedness they were intended to alleviate. It has also shown that,

while unproductive expenditure, such as that which is devoted to

amusements or luxury, is undoubtedly beneficial to those who provide it,

the fruit perishes in the usage; while productive expenditure, such as the

manufacture of machines, or the improvement of the soil, or the extension

of commercial enterprise, gives a new impulse to the creation of wealth.

It has proved that the first condition of the rapid accumulation of

capital is the diversion of money from unproductive to productive

channels, and that the amount of accumulated capital is one of the two

regulating influences of the wages of the labourer. From these positions

some persons have inferred that charity should be condemned as a form of

unproductive expenditure. But, in the first place, all charities that

foster habits of forethought and develop new capacities in the poorer

classes, such as popular education, or the formation of savings banks, or

insurance companies, or, in many cases, small and discriminating loans, or

measures directed to the suppression of dissipation, are in the strictest

sense productive; and the same may be said of many forms of employment,

given in exceptional crises through charitable motives; and, in the next

place, it is only necessary to remember that the happiness of mankind, to

which the accumulation of wealth should only be regarded as a means, is

the real object of charity, and it will appear that many forms which are

not strictly productive, in the commercial sense, are in the highest

degree conducive to this end, and have no serious counteracting evil. In

the alleviation of those sufferings that do not spring either from

improvidence or from vice, the warmest as well as the most enlightened

charity will find an ample sphere for its exertions.(192) Blindness, and

other exceptional calamities, against the effects of which prudence does

not and cannot provide, the miseries resulting from epidemics, from war,

from famine, from the first sudden collapse of industry, produced by new

inventions or changes in the channels of commerce; hospitals, which,

besides other advantages, are the greatest schools of medical science, and

withdraw from the crowded alley multitudes who would otherwise form

centres of contagion—these, and such as these, will long tax to the utmost

the generosity of the wealthy; while, even in the spheres upon which the

political economist looks with the most unfavourable eye, exceptional

cases will justify exceptional assistance. The charity which is pernicious

is commonly not the highest but the lowest kind. The rich man, prodigal of

money, which is to him of little value, but altogether incapable of

devoting any personal attention to the object of his alms, often injures

society by his donations; but this is rarely the case with that far nobler

charity which makes men familiar with the haunts of wretchedness, and

follows the object of its care through all the phases of his life. The

question of the utility of charity is merely a question of ultimate

consequences. Political economy has, no doubt, laid down some general

rules of great value on the subject; but yet the pages which Cicero

devoted to it nearly two thousand years ago might have been written by the

most enlightened modern economist; and it will be continually found that

the Protestant lady, working in her parish, by the simple force of common

sense and by a scrupulous and minute attention to the condition and

character of those whom she relieves, is unconsciously illustrating with

perfect accuracy the enlightened charity of Malthus.

But in order that charity should be useful, it is essential that the

benefit of the sufferer should be a real object to the donor; and a very

large proportion of the evils that have arisen from Catholic charity may

be traced to the absence of this condition. The first substitution of

devotion for philanthropy, as the motive of benevolence, gave so powerful

a stimulus to the affections, that it may on the whole be regarded as a

benefit, though, by making compassion operate solely through a theological

medium, it often produced among theologians a more than common

indifference to the sufferings of all who were external to their religious

community. But the new principle speedily degenerated into a belief in the

expiatory nature of the gifts. A form of what may be termed selfish

charity arose, which acquired at last gigantic proportions, and exercised

a most pernicious influence upon Christendom. Men gave money to the poor,

simply and exclusively for their own spiritual benefit, and the welfare of

the sufferer was altogether foreign to their thoughts.(193)

The evil which thus arose from some forms of Catholic charity may be

traced from a very early period, but it only acquired its full magnitude

after some centuries. The Roman system of gratuitous distribution was, in

the eyes of the political economist, about the worst that could be

conceived, and the charity of the Church being, in at least a measure,

discriminating, was at first a very great, though even then not an

unmingled, good. Labour was also not unfrequently enjoined as a duty by

the Fathers, and at a later period the services of the Benedictine monks,

in destroying by their example the stigma which slavery had attached to

it, were very great. Still, one of the first consequences of the exuberant

charity of the Church was to multiply impostors and mendicants, and the

idleness of the monks was one of the earliest complaints. Valentinian made

a severe law, condemning robust beggars to perpetual slavery. As the

monastic system was increased, and especially after the mendicant orders

had consecrated mendicancy, the evil assumed gigantic dimensions. Many

thousands of strong men, absolutely without private means, were in every

country withdrawn from productive labour, and supported by charity. The

notion of the meritorious nature of simple almsgiving immeasurably

multiplied beggars. The stigma, which it is the highest interest of

society to attach to mendicancy, it became a main object of theologians to

remove. Saints wandered through the world begging money, that they might

give to beggars, or depriving themselves of their garments, that they

might clothe the naked, and the result of their teaching was speedily

apparent. In all Catholic countries where ecclesiastical influences have

been permitted to develop unmolested, the monastic organisations have

proved a deadly canker, corroding the prosperity of the nation.

Withdrawing multitudes from all production, encouraging a blind and

pernicious almsgiving, diffusing habits of improvidence through the poorer

classes, fostering an ignorant admiration for saintly poverty, and an

equally ignorant antipathy to the habits and aims of an industrial

civilisation, they have paralysed all energy, and proved an insuperable

barrier to material progress. The poverty they have relieved has been

insignificant compared with the poverty they have caused. In no case was

the abolition of monasteries effected in a more indefensible manner than

in England; but the transfer of property, that was once employed in a

great measure in charity, to the courtiers of King Henry, was ultimately a

benefit to the English poor; for no misapplication of this property by

private persons could produce as much evil as an unrestrained monasticism.

The value of Catholic services in alleviating pain and sickness, and the

more exceptional forms of suffering, can never be overrated. The noble

heroism of her servants, who have devoted themselves to charity, has never

been surpassed, and the perfection of their organisation has, I think,

never been equalled; but in the sphere of simple poverty it can hardly be

doubted that the Catholic Church has created more misery than it has

cured.

Still, even in this field, we must not forget the benefits resulting, if

not to the sufferer, at least to the donor. Charitable habits, even when

formed in the first instance from selfish motives, even when so

misdirected as to be positively injurious to the recipient, rarely fail to

exercise a softening and purifying influence on the character. All through

the darkest period of the middle ages, amid ferocity and fanaticism and

brutality, we may trace the subduing influence of Catholic charity,

blending strangely with every excess of violence and every outburst of

persecution. It would be difficult to conceive a more frightful picture of

society than is presented by the history of Gregory of Tours; but that

long series of atrocious crimes, narrated with an almost appalling

tranquillity, is continually interspersed with accounts of kings, queens,

or prelates, who, in the midst of the disorganised society, made the

relief of the poor the main object of their lives. No period of history

exhibits a larger amount of cruelty, licentiousness, and fanaticism than

the Crusades; but side by side with the military enthusiasm, and with the

almost universal corruption, there expanded a vast movement of charity,

which covered Christendom with hospitals for the relief of leprosy, and

which grappled nobly, though ineffectually, with the many forms of

suffering that were generated. St. Peter Nolasco, whose great labours in

ransoming captive Christians I have already noticed, was an active

participator in the atrocious massacre of the Albigenses.(194) Of Shane

O’Neale, one of the ablest, but also one of the most ferocious, Irish

chieftains who ever defied the English power, it is related, amid a crowd

of crimes, that, “sitting at meat, before he put one morsel into his mouth

he used to slice a portion above the daily alms, and send it to some

beggar at his gate, saying it was meet to serve Christ first.”(195)

The great evils produced by the encouragement of mendicancy which has

always accompanied the uncontrolled development of Catholicity, have

naturally given rise to much discussion and legislation. The fierce

denunciations of the mendicant orders by William of St. Amour in the

thirteenth century were not on account of their encouragement of

mischievous charity;(196) but one of the disciples of Wycliffe, named

Nicholas of Hereford, was conspicuous for his opposition to indiscriminate

gifts to beggars;(197) and a few measures of an extended order appear to

have been taken even before the Reformation.(198) In England laws of the

most savage cruelty were then passed, in hopes of eradicating mendicancy.

A parliament of Henry VIII., before the suppression of the monasteries,

issued a law providing a system of organised charity, and imposing on any

one who gave anything to a beggar a fine of ten times the value of his

gift. A sturdy beggar was to be punished with whipping for the first

offence, with whipping and the loss of the tip of his ear for the second

and with death for the third.(199) Under Edward VI., an atrocious law,

which, however, was repealed in the same reign, enacted that every sturdy

beggar who refused to work should be branded, and adjudged for two years

as a slave to the person who gave information against him; and if he took

flight during his period of servitude, he was condemned for the first

offence to perpetual slavery, and for the second to death. The master was

authorised to put a ring of iron round the neck of his slave, to chain

him, and to scourge him. Any one might take the children of a sturdy

beggar for apprentices, till the boys were twenty-four and the girls

twenty.(200) Another law, made under Elizabeth, punished with death any

strong man under the age of eighteen who was convicted for the third time

of begging; but the penalty in this reign was afterwards reduced to a

life-long service in the galleys, or to banishment, with a penalty of

death to the returned convict.(201) Under the same queen the poor-law

system was elaborated, and Malthus long afterwards showed that its effects

in discouraging parsimony rendered it scarcely less pernicious than the

monastic system that had preceded it. In many Catholic countries, severe,

though less atrocious, measures were taken to grapple with the evil of

mendicancy. That shrewd and sagacious pontiff, Sixtus V., who, though not

the greatest man, was by far the greatest statesman who has ever sat on

the papal throne, made praiseworthy efforts to check it at Rome, where

ecclesiastical influence had always made it peculiarly prevalent.(202)

Charles V., in 1531, issued a severe enactment against beggars in the

Netherlands, but excepted from its operation mendicant friars and

pilgrims.(203) Under Lewis XIV., equally severe measures were taken in

France. But though the practical evil was fully felt, there was little

philosophical investigation of its causes before the eighteenth century.

Locke in England,(204) and Berkeley in Ireland,(205) briefly glanced at

the subject; and in 1704 Defoe published a very remarkable tract, called,

“Giving Alms no Charity,” in which he noticed the extent to which

mendicancy existed in England, though wages were higher than in any

Continental country.(206) A still more remarkable book, written by an

author named Ricci, appeared at Modena in 1787, and excited considerable

attention. The author pointed out with much force the gigantic development

of mendicancy in Italy, traced it to the excessive charity of the people,

and appears to have regarded as an evil all charity which sprang from

religious motives and was greater than would spring from the unaided

instincts of men.(207) The freethinker Mandeville had long before assailed

charity schools, and the whole system of endeavouring to elevate the

poor,(208) and Magdalen asylums and foundling hospitals have had fierce,

though I believe much mistaken, adversaries.(209) The reforms of the

poor-laws, and the writings of Malthus, gave a new impulse to discussion

on the subject; but, with the qualifications I have stated, no new

discoveries have, I conceive, thrown any just cloud upon the essential

principle of Christian charity.

The last method by which Christianity has laboured to soften the

characters of men has been by accustoming the imagination to expatiate

continually upon images of tenderness and of pathos. Our imaginations,

though less influential than our occupations, probably affect our moral

characters more deeply than our judgments, and, in the case of the poorer

classes especially, the cultivation of this part of our nature is of

inestimable importance. Rooted, for the most part, during their entire

lives, to a single spot, excluded by their ignorance and their

circumstances from most of the varieties of interest that animate the

minds of other men, condemned to constant and plodding labour, and

engrossed for ever with the minute cares of an immediate and an anxious

present, their whole natures would have been hopelessly contracted, were

there no sphere in which their imaginations could expand. Religion is the

one romance of the poor. It alone extends the narrow horizon of their

thoughts, supplies the images of their dreams, allures them to the

supersensual and the ideal. The graceful beings with which the creative

fancy of Paganism peopled the universe shed a poetic glow on the peasant’s

toil. Every stage of agriculture was presided over by a divinity, and the

world grew bright by the companionship of the gods. But it is the

peculiarity of the Christian types, that, while they have fascinated the

imagination, they have also purified the heart. The tender, winning, and

almost feminine beauty of the Christian Founder, the Virgin mother, the

agonies of Gethsemane or of Calvary, the many scenes of compassion and

suffering that fill the sacred writings, are the pictures which, for

eighteen hundred years, have governed the imaginations of the rudest and

most ignorant of mankind. Associated with the fondest recollections of

childhood, with the music of the church bells, with the clustered lights

and the tinsel splendour, that seem to the peasant the very ideal of

majesty; painted over the altar where he received the companion of his

life, around the cemetery where so many whom he had loved were laid, on

the stations of the mountain, on the portal of the vineyard, on the chapel

where the storm-tossed mariner fulfils his grateful vow; keeping guard

over his cottage door, and looking down upon his humble bed, forms of

tender beauty and gentle pathos for ever haunt the poor man’s fancy, and

silently win their way into the very depths of his being. More than any

spoken eloquence, more than any dogmatic teaching, they transform and

subdue his character, till he learns to realise the sanctity of weakness

and suffering, the supreme majesty of compassion and gentleness.

Imperfect and inadequate as is the sketch I have drawn, it will be

sufficient to show how great and multiform have been the influences of

Christian philanthropy. The shadows that rest upon the picture, I have not

concealed; but, when all due allowance has been made for them, enough will

remain to claim our deepest admiration. The high conception that has been

formed of the sanctity of human life, the protection of infancy, the

elevation and final emancipation of the slave classes, the suppression of

barbarous games, the creation of a vast and multifarious organisation of

charity, and the education of the imagination by the Christian type,

constitute together a movement of philanthropy which has never been

paralleled or approached in the Pagan world. The effects of this movement

in promoting happiness have been very great. Its effect in determining

character has probably been still greater. In that proportion or

disposition of qualities which constitutes the ideal character, the

gentler and more benevolent virtues have obtained, through Christianity,

the foremost place. In the first and purest period they were especially

supreme; but in the third century a great ascetic movement arose, which

gradually brought a new type of character into the ascendant, and diverted

the enthusiasm of the Church into new channels.

‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐

Tertullian, writing in the second century, contrasts, in a well-known

passage, the Christians of his day with the gymnosophists or hermits of

India, declaring that, unlike these, the Christians did not fly from the

world, but mixed with Pagans in the forum, in the market-places, in the

public baths, in the ordinary business of life.(210) But although the life

of the hermit or the monk was unknown in the Church for more than two

hundred years after its foundation, we may detect, almost from the

earliest time, a tone of feeling which produces it. The central

conceptions of the monastic system are the meritoriousness of complete

abstinence from all sexual intercourse, and of complete renunciation of

the world. The first of these notions appeared in the very earliest

period, in the respect attached to the condition of virginity, which was

always regarded as sacred, and especially esteemed in the clergy, though

for a long time it was not imposed as an obligation. The second was shown

in the numerous efforts that were made to separate the Christian community

as far as possible from the society in which it existed. Nothing could be

more natural than that, when the increase and triumph of the Church had

thrown the bulk of the Christians into active political or military

labour, some should, as an exercise of piety, have endeavoured to imitate

the separation from the world which was once the common condition of all.

Besides this, a movement of asceticism had long been raging like a mental

epidemic through the world. Among the Jews—whose law, from the great

stress it laid upon marriage, the excellence of the rapid multiplication

of population, and the hope of being the ancestor of the Messiah, was

peculiarly repugnant to monastic conceptions—the Essenes had constituted a

complete monastic society, abstaining from marriage and separating

themselves wholly from the world. In Rome, whose practical genius was, if

possible, even more opposed than that of the Jews to an inactive

monasticism, and even among those philosophers who most represented its

active and practical spirit, the same tendency was shown. The Cynics of

the later Empire recommended a complete renunciation of domestic ties, and

a life spent mainly in the contemplation of wisdom. The Egyptian

philosophy, that soon after acquired an ascendancy in Europe, anticipated

still more closely the monastic ideal. On the outskirts of the Church, the

many sects of Gnostics and Manicheans all held under different forms the

essential evil of matter. The Docetæ, following the same notion, denied

the reality of the body of Christ. The Montanists and the Novatians

surpassed and stimulated the private penances of the orthodox.(211) The

soil was thus thoroughly prepared for a great outburst of asceticism,

whenever the first seed was sown. This was done during the Decian

persecution. Paul, the hermit, who fled to the desert during that

persecution, is said to have been the first of the tribe.(212) Antony, who

speedily followed, greatly extended the movement, and in a few years the

hermits had become a mighty nation. Persecution, which in the first

instance drove great numbers as fugitives to the deserts, soon aroused a

passionate religious enthusiasm that showed itself in an ardent desire for

those sufferings which were believed to lead directly to heaven; and this

enthusiasm, after the peace of Constantine, found its natural vent and

sphere in the macerations of the desert life. The imaginations of men were

fascinated by the poetic circumstances of that life which St. Jerome most

eloquently embellished. Women were pre-eminent in recruiting for it. The

same spirit that had formerly led the wife of the Pagan official to

entertain secret relations with the Christian priests, now led the wife of

the Christian to become the active agent of the monks. While the father

designed his son for the army, or for some civil post, the mother was

often straining every nerve to induce him to become a hermit. The monks

secretly corresponded with her, they skilfully assumed the functions of

education, in order that they might influence the young; and sometimes, to

evade the precautions or the anger of the father, they concealed their

profession, and assumed the garb of lay pedagogues.(213) The pulpit, which

had almost superseded, and immeasurably transcended in influence, the

chairs of the rhetoricians, and which was filled by such men as Ambrose,

Augustine, Chrysostom, Basil, and the Gregories, was continually exerted

in the same cause, and the extreme luxury of the great cities produced a

violent, but not unnatural, reaction of asceticism. The dignity of the

monastic position, which sometimes brought men who had been simple

peasants into connection with the emperors, the security it furnished to

fugitive slaves and criminals, the desire of escaping from those fiscal

burdens which, in the corrupt and oppressive administration of the Empire,

had acquired an intolerable weight, and especially the barbarian

invasions, which produced every variety of panic and wretchedness,

conspired with the new religious teaching in peopling the desert. A

theology of asceticism was speedily formed. The examples of Elijah and

Elisha, to the first of whom, by a bold flight of imagination, some later

Carmelites ascribed the origin of their order, and the more recent

instance of the Baptist, were at once adduced. To an ordinary layman the

life of an anchorite might appear in the highest degree opposed to that of

the Teacher who began His mission at a marriage feast; who was continually

reproached by His enemies for the readiness with which He mixed with the

world, and who selected from the female sex some of His purest and most

devoted followers; but the monkish theologians, avoiding, for the most

part, these topics, dilated chiefly on His immaculate birth, His virgin

mother, His life of celibacy, His exhortation to the rich young man. The

fact that St. Peter, to whom a general primacy was already ascribed, was

unquestionably married was a difficulty which was in a measure met by a

tradition that both he, and the other married apostles, abstained from

intercourse with their wives after their conversion.(214) St. Paul,

however, was probably unmarried, and his writings showed a decided

preference for the unmarried state, which the ingenuity of theologians

also discovered in some quarters where it might be least expected. Thus,

St. Jerome assures us that when the clean animals entered the ark by

sevens, and the unclean ones by pairs, the odd number typified the

celibate, and the even the married condition. Even of the unclean animals

but one pair of each kind was admitted, lest they should perpetrate the

enormity of second marriage.(215) Ecclesiastical tradition sustained the

tendency, and Saint James, as he has been portrayed by Hegesippus, became

a kind of ideal saint, a faithful picture of what, according to the

notions of theologians, was the true type of human nobility. He “was

consecrated,” it was said, “from his mother’s womb. He drank neither wine

nor fermented liquors, and abstained from animal food. A razor never came

upon his head. He never anointed himself with oil, or used a bath. He

alone was allowed to enter the sanctuary. He never wore woollen, but

linen, garments. He was in the habit of entering the temple alone, and was

often found upon his bended knees, and interceding for the forgiveness of

the people, so that his knees became as hard as a camel’s.”(216)

The progress of the monastic movement, as has been truly said, “was not

less rapid or universal than that of Christianity itself.”(217) Of the

actual number of the anchorites, those who are acquainted with the extreme

unveracity of the first historians of the movement will hesitate to speak

with confidence. It is said that St. Pachomius, who, early in the fourth

century, founded the cœnobitic mode of life, enlisted under his

jurisdiction 7,000 monks;(218) that in the days of St. Jerome nearly

50,000 monks were sometimes assembled at the Easter festivals;(219) that

in the desert of Nitria alone there were, in the fourth century, 5,000

monks under a single abbot;(220) that an Egyptian city named Oxyrynchus

devoted itself almost exclusively to the ascetic life, and included 20,000

virgins and 10,000 monks;(221) that St. Serapion presided over 10,000

monks;(222) and that, towards the close of the fourth century, the

monastic population in a great part of Egypt was nearly equal to the

population of the cities.(223) Egypt was the parent of monachism, and it

was there that it attained both its extreme development and its most

austere severity; but there was very soon scarcely any Christian country

in which a similar movement was not ardently propagated. St. Athanasius

and St. Zeno are said to have introduced it into Italy,(224) where it soon

afterwards received a great stimulus from St. Jerome. St. Hilarion

instituted the first monks in Palestine, and he lived to see many

thousands subject to his rule, and towards the close of his life to plant

monachism in Cyprus. Eustathius, Bishop of Sebastia, spread it through

Armenia, Paphlagonia, and Pontus. St. Basil laboured along the wild shores

of the Euxine. St. Martin of Tours founded the first monastery in Gaul,

and 2,000 monks attended his funeral. Unrecorded missionaries planted the

new institution in the heart of Æthiopia, amid the little islands that

stud the Mediterranean, in the secluded valleys of Wales and Ireland.(225)

But even more wonderful than the many thousands who thus abandoned the

world is the reverence with which they were regarded by those who, by

their attainments or their character, would seem most opposed to the

monastic ideal. No one had more reason than Augustine to know the danger

of enforced celibacy, but St. Augustine exerted all his energies to spread

monasticism through his diocese. St. Ambrose, who was by nature an acute

statesman; St. Jerome and St. Basil, who were ambitious scholars; St.

Chrysostom, who was pre-eminently formed to sway the refined throngs of a

metropolis—all exerted their powers in favour of the life of solitude, and

the last three practised it themselves. St. Arsenius, who was surpassed by

no one in the extravagance of his penances, had held a high office at the

court of the Emperor Arcadius. Pilgrims wandered among the deserts,

collecting accounts of the miracles and the austerities of the saints,

which filled Christendom with admiration; and the strange biographies

which were thus formed, wild and grotesque as they are, enable us to

realise very vividly the general features of the anchorite life which

became the new ideal of the Christian world.(226)

There is, perhaps, no phase in the moral history of mankind of a deeper or

more painful interest than this ascetic epidemic. A hideous, sordid, and

emaciated maniac, without knowledge, without patriotism, without natural

affection, passing his life in a long routine of useless and atrocious

self-torture, and quailing before the ghastly phantoms of his delirious

brain, had become the ideal of the nations which had known the writings of

Plato and Cicero and the lives of Socrates and Cato. For about two

centuries, the hideous maceration of the body was regarded as the highest

proof of excellence. St. Jerome declares, with a thrill of admiration, how

he had seen a monk, who for thirty years had lived exclusively on a small

portion of barley bread and of muddy water; another, who lived in a hole

and never ate more than five figs for his daily repast;(227) a third, who

cut his hair only on Easter Sunday, who never washed his clothes, who

never changed his tunic till it fell to pieces, who starved himself till

his eyes grew dim, and his skin “like a pumice stone,” and whose merits,

shown by these austerities, Homer himself would be unable to recount.(228)

For six months, it is said, St. Macarius of Alexandria slept in a marsh,

and exposed his body naked to the stings of venomous flies. He was

accustomed to carry about with him eighty pounds of iron. His disciple,

St. Eusebius, carried one hundred and fifty pounds of iron, and lived for

three years in a dried-up well. St. Sabinus would only eat corn that had

become rotten by remaining for a month in water. St. Besarion spent forty

days and nights in the middle of thorn-bushes, and for forty years never

lay down when he slept,(229) which last penance was also during fifteen

years practised by St. Pachomius.(230) Some saints, like St. Marcian,

restricted themselves to one meal a day, so small that they continually

suffered the pangs of hunger.(231) Of one of them it is related that his

daily food was six ounces of bread and a few herbs; that he was never seen

to recline on a mat or bed, or even to place his limbs easily for sleep;

but that sometimes, from excess of weariness, his eyes would close at his

meals, and the food would drop from his mouth.(232) Other saints, however,

ate only every second day;(233) while many, if we could believe the

monkish historian, abstained for whole weeks from all nourishment.(234)

St. Macarius of Alexandria is said during an entire week to have never

lain down, or eaten anything but a few uncooked herbs on Sunday.(235) Of

another famous saint, named John, it is asserted that for three whole

years he stood in prayer, leaning upon a rock; that during all that time

he never sat or lay down, and that his only nourishment was the Sacrament,

which was brought him on Sundays.(236) Some of the hermits lived in

deserted dens of wild beasts, others in dried-up wells, while others found

a congenial resting-place among the tombs.(237) Some disdained all

clothes, and crawled abroad like the wild beasts, covered only by their

matted hair. In Mesopotamia, and part of Syria, there existed a sect known

by the name of “Grazers,” who never lived under a roof, who ate neither

flesh nor bread, but who spent their time for ever on the mountain side,

and ate grass like cattle.(238) The cleanliness of the body was regarded

as a pollution of the soul, and the saints who were most admired had

become one hideous mass of clotted filth. St. Athanasius relates with

enthusiasm how St. Antony, the patriarch of monachism, had never, to

extreme old age, been guilty of washing his feet.(239) The less constant

St. Pœmen fell into this habit for the first time when a very old man,

and, with a glimmering of common sense, defended himself against the

astonished monks by saying that he had “learnt to kill not his body, but

his passions.”(240) St. Abraham the hermit, however, who lived for fifty

years after his conversion, rigidly refused from that date to wash either

his face or his feet.(241) He was, it is said, a person of singular

beauty, and his biographer somewhat strangely remarks that “his face

reflected the purity of his soul.”(242) St. Ammon had never seen himself

naked.(243) A famous virgin named Silvia, though she was sixty years old

and though bodily sickness was a consequence of her habits, resolutely

refused, on religious principles, to wash any part of her body except her

fingers.(244) St. Euphraxia joined a convent of one hundred and thirty

nuns, who never washed their feet, and who shuddered at the mention of a

bath.(245) An anchorite once imagined that he was mocked by an illusion of

the devil, as he saw gliding before him through the desert a naked

creature black with filth and years of exposure, and with white hair

floating to the wind. It was a once beautiful woman, St. Mary of Egypt,

who had thus, during forty-seven years, been expiating her sins.(246) The

occasional decadence of the monks into habits of decency was a subject of

much reproach. “Our fathers,” said the abbot Alexander, looking mournfully

back to the past, “never washed their faces, but we frequent the public

baths.”(247) It was related of one monastery in the desert, that the monks

suffered greatly from want of water to drink; but at the prayer of the

abbot Theodosius a copious stream was produced. But soon some monks,

tempted by the abundant supply, diverged from their old austerity, and

persuaded the abbot to avail himself of the stream for the construction of

a bath. The bath was made. Once, and once only, did the monks enjoy their

ablutions, when the stream ceased to flow. Prayers, tears, and fastings

were in vain. A whole year passed. At last the abbot destroyed the bath,

which was the object of the Divine displeasure, and the waters flowed

afresh.(248) But of all the evidences of the loathsome excesses to which

this spirit was carried, the life of St. Simeon Stylites is probably the

most remarkable. It would be difficult to conceive a more horrible or

disgusting picture than is given of the penances by which that saint

commenced his ascetic career. He had bound a rope around him so that it

became imbedded in his flesh, which putrefied around it. “A horrible

stench, intolerable to the bystanders, exhaled from his body and worms

dropped from him whenever he moved, and they filled his bed.” Sometimes he

left the monastery and slept in a dry well, inhabited, it is said, by

dæmons. He built successively three pillars, the last being sixty feet

high and scarcely two cubits in circumference, and on this pillar, during

thirty years, he remained exposed to every change of climate, ceaselessly

and rapidly bending his body in prayer almost to the level of his feet. A

spectator attempted to number these rapid motions, but desisted from

weariness when he had counted 1,244. For a whole year, we are told, St.

Simeon stood upon one leg, the other being covered with hideous ulcers,

while his biographer was commissioned to stand by his side, to pick up the

worms that fell from his body, and to replace them in the sores, the saint

saying to the worm, “Eat what God has given you.” From every quarter

pilgrims of every degree thronged to do him homage. A crowd of prelates

followed him to the grave. A brilliant star is said to have shone

miraculously over his pillar; the general voice of mankind pronounced him

to be the highest model of a Christian saint; and several other anchorites

imitated or emulated his penances.(249)

There is, if I mistake not, no department of literature the importance of

which is more inadequately realised than the lives of the saints. Even

where they have no direct historical value, they have a moral value of the

very highest order. They may not tell us with accuracy what men did at

particular epochs; but they display with the utmost vividness what they

thought and felt, their measure of probability, and their ideal of

excellence. Decrees of councils, elaborate treatises of theologians,

creeds, liturgies, and canons, are all but the husks of religious history.

They reveal what was professed and argued before the world, but not that

which was realised in the imagination or enshrined in the heart. The

history of art, which in its ruder day reflected with delicate fidelity

the fleeting images of an anthropomorphic age, is in this respect

invaluable; but still more important is that vast Christian mythology,

which grew up spontaneously from the intellectual condition of the time,

included all its dearest hopes, wishes, ideals, and imaginings, and

constituted, during many centuries, the popular literature of Christendom.

In the case of the saints of the deserts, there can be no question that

the picture—which is drawn chiefly by eye-witnesses—however grotesque may

be some of its details, is in its leading features historically true. It

is true that self-torture was for some centuries regarded as the chief

measure of human excellence, that tens of thousands of the most devoted

men fled to the desert to reduce themselves by maceration nearly to the

condition of the brute, and that this odious superstition had acquired an

almost absolute ascendancy in the ethics of the age. The examples of

asceticism I have cited are but a few out of many hundreds, and volumes

might be written, and have been written, detailing them. Till the reform

of St. Benedict, the ideal was on the whole unchanged. The Western monks,

from the conditions of their climate, were constitutionally incapable of

rivalling the abstinence of the Egyptian anchorites; but their conception

of supreme excellence was much the same, and they laboured to compensate

for their inferiority in penances by claiming some superiority in

miracles. From the time of St. Pachomius, the cœnobitic life was adopted

by most monks; but the Eastern monasteries, with the important exception

of a vow of obedience, differed little from a collection of hermitages.

They were in the deserts; the monks commonly lived in separate cells; they

kept silence at their repasts; they rivalled one another in the

extravagance of their penances. A few feeble efforts were indeed made by

St. Jerome and others to moderate austerities, which frequently led to

insanity and suicide, to check the turbulence of certain wandering monks,

who were accustomed to defy the ecclesiastical authorities, and especially

to suppress monastic mendicancy, which had appeared prominently among some

heretical sects. The orthodox monks commonly employed themselves in

weaving mats of palm-leaves; but, living in the deserts, with no wants,

they speedily sank into a listless apathy; and the most admired were those

who, like Simeon Stylites, and the hermit John, of whom I have already

spoken, were most exclusively devoted to their superstition. Diversities

of individual character were, however, vividly displayed. Many anchorites,

without knowledge, passions, or imagination, having fled from servile toil

to the calm of the wilderness, passed the long hours in sleep or in a

mechanical routine of prayer, and their inert and languid existences,

prolonged to the extreme of old age, closed at last by a tranquil and

almost animal death. Others made their cells by the clear fountains and

clustering palm-trees of some oasis in the desert, and a blooming garden

arose beneath their toil. The numerous monks who followed St. Serapion

devoted themselves largely to agriculture, and sent shiploads of corn for

the benefit of the poor.(250) Of one old hermit it is related that, such

was the cheerfulness of his mind, that every sorrow was dispelled by his

presence, and the weary and the heartbroken were consoled by a few words

from his lips.(251) More commonly, however, the hermit’s cell was the

scene of perpetual mourning. Tears and sobs, and frantic strugglings with

imaginary dæmons, and paroxysms of religious despair, were the texture of

his life, and the dread of spiritual enemies, and of that death which his

superstition had rendered so terrible, embittered every hour of his

existence.(252) The solace of intellectual occupations was rarely resorted

to. “The duty,” said St. Jerome, “of a monk is not to teach, but to

weep.”(253) A cultivated and disciplined mind was the least subject to

those hallucinations, which were regarded as the highest evidence of

Divine favour;(254) and although in an age when the passion for asceticism

was general, many scholars became ascetics, the great majority of the

early monks appear to have been men who were not only absolutely ignorant

themselves, but who also looked upon learning with positive disfavour. St.

Antony, the true founder of monachism, refused when a boy to learn

letters, because it would bring him into too great intercourse with other

boys.(255) At a time when St. Jerome had suffered himself to feel a deep

admiration for the genius of Cicero, he was, as he himself tells us, borne

in the night before the tribunal of Christ, accused of being rather a

Ciceronian than a Christian, and severely flagellated by the angels.(256)

This saint, however, afterwards modified his opinions about the Pagan

writings, and he was compelled to defend himself at length against his

more jealous brethren, who accused him of defiling his writings with

quotations from Pagan authors, of employing some monks in copying Cicero,

and of explaining Virgil to some children at Bethlehem.(257) Of one monk

it is related that, being especially famous as a linguist, he made it his

penance to remain perfectly silent for thirty years;(258) of another, that

having discovered a few books in the cell of a brother hermit, he

reproached the student with having thus defrauded of their property the

widow and the orphan;(259) of others, that their only books were copies of

the New Testament, which they sold to relieve the poor.(260)

With such men, living such a life, visions and miracles were necessarily

habitual. All the elements of hallucination were there. Ignorant and

superstitious, believing as a matter of religious conviction that

countless dæmons filled the air, attributing every fluctuation of his

temperament, and every exceptional phenomenon in surrounding nature, to

spiritual agency; delirious, too, from solitude and long continued

austerities, the hermit soon mistook for palpable realities the phantoms

of his brain. In the ghastly gloom of the sepulchre, where, amid

mouldering corpses, he took up his abode; in the long hours of the night

of penance, when the desert wind sobbed around his lonely cell, and the

cries of wild beasts were borne upon his ear, visible forms of lust or

terror appeared to haunt him, and strange dramas were enacted by those who

were contending for his soul. An imagination strained to the utmost limit,

acting upon a frame attenuated and diseased by macerations, produced

bewildering psychological phenomena, paroxysms of conflicting passions,

sudden alternations of joy and anguish, which he regarded as manifestly

supernatural. Sometimes, in the very ecstasy of his devotion, the memory

of old scenes would crowd upon his mind. The shady groves and soft

voluptuous gardens of his native city would arise, and, kneeling alone

upon the burning sand, he seemed to see around him the fair groups of

dancing-girls, on whose warm, undulating limbs and wanton smiles his

youthful eyes had too fondly dwelt. Sometimes his temptation sprang from

remembered sounds. The sweet, licentious songs of other days came floating

on his ear, and his heart was thrilled with the passions of the past. And

then the scene would change. As his lips were murmuring the psalter, his

imagination, fired perhaps by the music of some martial psalm, depicted

the crowded amphitheatre. The throng and passion and mingled cries of

eager thousands were present to his mind, and the fierce joy of the

gladiators passed through the tumult of his dream.(261) The simplest

incident came at last to suggest diabolical influence. An old hermit,

weary and fainting upon his journey, once thought how refreshing would be

a draught of the honey of wild bees of the desert. At that moment his eye

fell upon a rock on which they had built a hive. He passed on with a

shudder and an exorcism, for he believed it to be a temptation of the

devil.(262) But most terrible of all were the struggles of young and

ardent men, through whose veins the hot blood of passion continually

flowed, physically incapable of a life of celibacy, and with all that

proneness to hallucination which a southern sun engenders, who were borne

on the wave of enthusiasm to the desert life. In the arms of Syrian or

African brides, whose soft eyes answered love with love, they might have

sunk to rest, but in the lonely wilderness no peace could ever visit their

souls. The Lives of the Saints paint with an appalling vividness the

agonies of their struggle. Multiplying with frantic energy the macerations

of the body, beating their breasts with anguish, the tears for ever

streaming from their eyes, imagining themselves continually haunted by

ever-changing forms of deadly beauty, which acquired a greater vividness

from the very passion with which they resisted them, their struggles not

unfrequently ended in insanity and in suicide. It is related that when St.

Pachomius and St. Palæmon were conversing together in the desert, a young

monk, with his countenance distracted with madness, rushed into their

presence, and, in a voice broken with convulsive sobs, poured out his tale

of sorrows. A woman, he said, had entered his cell, had seduced him by her

artifices, and then vanished miraculously in the air, leaving him half

dead upon the ground;—and then with a wild shriek the monk broke away from

the saintly listeners. Impelled, as they imagined, by an evil spirit, he

rushed across the desert, till he arrived at the next village, and there,

leaping into the open furnace of the public baths, he perished in the

flames.(263) Strange stories were told among the monks of revulsions of

passion even in the most advanced. Of one monk especially, who had long

been regarded as a pattern of asceticism, but who had suffered himself to

fall into that self-complacency which was very common among the

anchorites, it was told that one evening a fainting woman appeared at the

door of his cell, and implored him to give her shelter, and not permit her

to be devoured by the wild beasts. In an evil hour he yielded to her

prayer. With all the aspect of profound reverence she won his regards, and

at last ventured to lay her hand upon him. But that touch convulsed his

frame. Passions long slumbering and forgotten rushed with impetuous fury

through his veins. In a paroxysm of fierce love, he sought to clasp the

woman to his heart, but she vanished from his sight, and a chorus of

dæmons, with peals of laughter, exulted over his fall. The sequel of the

story, as it is told by the monkish writer, is, I think, of a very high

order of artistic merit. The fallen hermit did not seek, as might have

been expected, by penance and prayers to renew his purity. That moment of

passion and of shame had revealed in him a new nature, and severed him

irrevocably from the hopes and feelings of the ascetic life. The fair form

that had arisen upon his dream, though he knew it to be a deception luring

him to destruction, still governed his heart. He fled from the desert,

plunged anew into the world, avoided all intercourse with the monks, and

followed the light of that ideal beauty even into the jaws of hell.(264)

Anecdotes of this kind, circulated among the monks, contributed to

heighten the feelings of terror with which they regarded all communication

with the other sex. But to avoid such communication was sometimes very

difficult. Few things are more striking, in the early historians of the

movement we are considering, than the manner in which narratives of the

deepest tragical interest alternate with extremely whimsical accounts of

the profound admiration with which the female devotees regarded the most

austere anchorites, and the unwearied perseverance with which they

endeavoured to force themselves upon their notice. Some women seem in this

respect to have been peculiarly fortunate. St. Melania, who devoted a

great portion of her fortune to the monks, accompanied by the historian

Rufinus, made, near the end of the fourth century, a long pilgrimage

through the Syrian and Egyptian hermitages.(265) But with many of the

hermits it was a rule never to look upon the face of any woman, and the

number of years they had escaped this contamination was commonly stated as

a conspicuous proof of their excellence. St. Basil would only speak to a

woman under extreme necessity.(266) St. John of Lycopolis had not seen a

woman for forty-eight years.(267) A tribune was sent by his wife on a

pilgrimage to St. John the hermit to implore him to allow her to visit

him, her desire being so intense that she would probably, in the opinion

of her husband, die if it were ungratified. At last the hermit told his

suppliant that he would that night visit his wife when she was in bed in

her house. The tribune brought this strange message to his wife, who that

night saw the hermit in a dream.(268) A young Roman girl made a pilgrimage

from Italy to Alexandria, to look upon the face and obtain the prayers of

St. Arsenius, into whose presence she forced herself. Quailing beneath his

rebuffs, she flung herself at his feet, imploring him with tears to grant

her only request—to remember her, and to pray for her. “Remember you!”

cried the indignant saint; “it shall be the prayer of my life that I may

forget you.” The poor girl sought consolation from the Archbishop of

Alexandria, who comforted her by assuring her that, though she belonged to

the sex by which dæmons commonly tempt saints, he doubted not the hermit

would pray for her soul, though he would try to forget her face.(269)

Sometimes this female enthusiasm took another and a more subtle form, and

on more than one occasion women were known to attire themselves as men,

and to pass their lives undisturbed as anchorites. Among others, St.

Pelagia, who had been the most beautiful, and one of the most dangerously

seductive actresses of Antioch, having been somewhat strangely converted,

was appointed by the bishops to live in penance with an elderly virgin of

irreproachable piety; but, impelled, we are told, by her desire for a more

austere life, she fled from her companion, assumed a male attire, took

refuge among the monks on the Mount of Olives, and, with something of the

skill of her old profession, supported her feigned character so

consistently that she acquired great renown, and it was only (it is said)

after her death that the saints discovered who had been living among

them.(270)

The foregoing anecdotes and observations will, I hope, have given a

sufficiently clear idea of the general nature of the monastic life in its

earliest phase, and also of the writings it produced. We may now proceed

to examine the ways in which this mode of life affected both the ideal

type and the realised condition of Christian morals. And in the first

place, it is manifest that the proportion of virtues was altered. If an

impartial person were to glance over the ethics of the New Testament, and

were asked what was the central and distinctive virtue to which the sacred

writers most continually referred, he would doubtless answer that it was

that which is described as love, charity, or philanthropy. If he were to

apply a similar scrutiny to the writings of the fourth and fifth

centuries, he would answer that the cardinal virtue of the religious type

was not love, but chastity. And this chastity, which was regarded as the

ideal state, was not the purity of an undefiled marriage. It was the

absolute suppression of the whole sensual side of our nature. The chief

form of virtue, the central conception of the saintly life, was a

perpetual struggle against all carnal impulses, by men who altogether

refused the compromise of marriage. From this fact, if I mistake not, some

interesting and important consequences may be deduced.

In the first place, religion gradually assumed a very sombre hue. The

business of the saint was to eradicate a natural appetite, to attain a

condition which was emphatically abnormal. The depravity of human nature,

especially the essential evil of the body, was felt with a degree of

intensity that could never have been attained by moralists who were

occupied mainly with transient or exceptional vices, such as envy, anger,

or cruelty. And in addition to the extreme inveteracy of the appetite

which it was desired to eradicate, it should be remembered that a somewhat

luxurious and indulgent life, even when that indulgence is not itself

distinctly evil, even when it has a tendency to mollify the character, has

naturally the effect of strengthening the animal passions, and is

therefore directly opposed to the ascetic ideal. The consequence of this

was first of all a very deep sense of the habitual and innate depravity of

human nature; and, in the next place, a very strong association of the

idea of pleasure with that of vice. All this necessarily flowed from the

supreme value placed upon virginity. The tone of calm and joyousness that

characterises Greek philosophy, the almost complete absence of all sense

of struggle and innate sin that it displays, is probably in a very large

degree to be ascribed to the fact that, in the department of morals we are

considering, Greek moralists made no serious efforts to improve our

nature, and Greek public opinion acquiesced, without scandal, in an almost

boundless indulgence of illicit pleasures.

But while the great prominence at this time given to the conflicts of the

ascetic life threw a dark shade upon the popular estimate of human nature,

it contributed, I think, very largely to sustain and deepen that strong

conviction of the freedom of the human will which the Catholic Church has

always so strenuously upheld; for there is, probably, no other form of

moral conflict in which men are so habitually and so keenly sensible of

that distinction between our will and our desires, upon the reality of

which all moral freedom ultimately depends. It had also, I imagine,

another result, which it is difficult to describe with the same precision.

What may be called a strong animal nature—a nature, that is, in which the

passions are in vigorous, and at the same time healthy, action—is that in

which we should most naturally expect to find several moral qualities.

Good humour, frankness, generosity, active courage, sanguine energy,

buoyancy of temper, are the usual and appropriate accompaniments of a

vigorous animal temperament, and they are much more rarely found either in

natures that are essentially feeble and effeminate, or in natures which

have been artificially emasculated by penances, distorted from their

original tendency, and habitually held under severe control. The ideal

type of Catholicism being, on account of the supreme value placed upon

virginity, of the latter kind, the qualities I have mentioned have always

ranked very low in the Catholic conceptions of excellence, and the steady

tendency of Protestant and industrial civilisation has been to elevate

them.

I do not know whether the reader will regard these speculations—which I

advance with some diffidence—as far-fetched and fanciful. Our knowledge of

the physical antecedents of different moral qualities is so scanty that it

is difficult to speak on these matters with much confidence; but few

persons, I think, can have failed to observe that the physical

temperaments I have described differ not simply in the one great fact of

the intensity of the animal passions, but also in the aptitude of each to

produce a distinct moral type, or, in other words, in the harmony of each

with several qualities, both good and evil. A doctrine, therefore, which

connects one of these two temperaments indissolubly with the moral ideal,

affects the appreciation of a large number of moral qualities. But

whatever may be thought of the moral results springing from the physical

temperament which asceticism produced, there can be little controversy as

to the effects springing from the condition of life which it enjoined.

Severance from the interests and affections of all around him was the

chief object of the anchorite, and the first consequence of the prominence

of asceticism was a profound discredit thrown upon the domestic virtues.

The extent to which this discredit was carried, the intense hardness of

heart and ingratitude manifested by the saints towards those who were

bound to them by the closest of earthly ties, is known to few who have not

studied the original literature on the subject. These things are commonly

thrown into the shade by those modern sentimentalists who delight in

idealising the devotees of the past. To break by his ingratitude the heart

of the mother who had borne him, to persuade the wife who adored him that

it was her duty to separate from him for ever, to abandon his children,

uncared for and beggars, to the mercies of the world, was regarded by the

true hermit as the most acceptable offering he could make to his God. His

business was to save his own soul. The serenity of his devotion would be

impaired by the discharge of the simplest duties to his family. Evagrius,

when a hermit in the desert, received, after a long interval, letters from

his father and mother. He could not bear that the equable tenor of his

thoughts should be disturbed by the recollection of those who loved him,

so he cast the letters unread into the fire.(271) A man named Mutius,

accompanied by his only child, a little boy of eight years old, abandoned

his possessions and demanded admission into a monastery. The monks

received him, but they proceeded to discipline his heart. “He had already

forgotten that he was rich; he must next be taught to forget that he was a

father.”(272) His little child was separated from him, clothed in dirty

rags, subjected to every form of gross and wanton hardship, beaten,

spurned, and ill treated. Day after day the father was compelled to look

upon his boy wasting away with sorrow, his once happy countenance for ever

stained with tears, distorted by sobs of anguish. But yet, says the

admiring biographer, “though he saw this day by day, such was his love for

Christ, and for the virtue of obedience, that the father’s heart was rigid

and unmoved. He thought little of the tears of his child. He was anxious

only for his own humility and perfection in virtue.”(273) At last the

abbot told him to take his child and throw it into the river. He

proceeded, without a murmur or apparent pang, to obey, and it was only at

the last moment that the monks interposed, and on the very brink of the

river saved the child. Mutius afterwards rose to a high position among the

ascetics, and was justly regarded as having displayed in great perfection

the temper of a saint.(274) An inhabitant of Thebes once came to the abbot

Sisoes, and asked to be made a monk. The abbot asked if he had any one

belonging to him. He answered, “A son.” “Take your son,” rejoined the old

man, “and throw him into the river, and then you may become a monk.” The

father hastened to fulfil the command, and the deed was almost consummated

when a messenger sent by Sisoes revoked the order.(275)

Sometimes the same lesson was taught under the form of a miracle. A man

had once deserted his three children to become a monk. Three years after,

he determined to bring them into the monastery, but, on returning to his

home, found that the two eldest had died during his absence. He came to

his abbot, bearing in his arms his youngest child, who was still little

more than an infant. The abbot turned to him and said, “Do you love this

child?” The father answered, “Yes.” Again the abbot said, “Do you love it

dearly?” The father answered as before. “Then take the child,” said the

abbot, “and throw it into the fire upon yonder hearth.” The father did as

he was commanded, and the child remained unharmed amid the flames.(276)

But it was especially in their dealings with their female relations that

this aspect of the monastic character was vividly displayed. In this case

the motive was not simply to mortify family affections—it was also to

guard against the possible danger resulting from the presence of a woman.

The fine flower of that saintly purity might have been disturbed by the

sight of a mother’s or a sister’s face. The ideal of one age appears

sometimes too grotesque for the caricature of another; and it is curious

to observe how pale and weak is the picture which Molière drew of the

affected prudery of Tartuffe,(277) when compared with the narratives that

are gravely propounded in the Lives of the Saints. When the abbot Sisoes

had become a very old, feeble, and decrepit man, his disciples exhorted

him to leave the desert for an inhabited country. Sisoes seemed to yield;

but he stipulated, as a necessary condition, that in his new abode he

should never be compelled to encounter the peril and perturbation of

looking on a woman’s face. To such a nature, of course, the desert alone

was suitable, and the old man was suffered to die in peace.(278) A monk

was once travelling with his mother—in itself a most unusual

circumstance—and, having arrived at a bridgeless stream, it became

necessary for him to carry her across. To her surprise, he began carefully

wrapping up his hands in cloths; and upon her asking the reason, he

explained that he was alarmed lest he should be unfortunate enough to

touch her, and thereby disturb the equilibrium of his nature.(279) The

sister of St. John of Calama loved him dearly, and earnestly implored him

that she might look upon his face once more before she died. On his

persistent refusal, she declared that she would make a pilgrimage to him

in the desert. The alarmed and perplexed saint at last wrote to her,

promising to visit her if she would engage to relinquish her design. He

went to her in disguise, received a cup of water from her hands, and came

away without being discovered. She wrote to him, reproaching him with not

having fulfilled his promise. He answered her that he had indeed visited

her, that “by the mercy of Jesus Christ he had not been recognised,” and

that she must never see him again.(280) The mother of St. Theodorus came

armed with letters from the bishops to see her son, but he implored his

abbot, St. Pachomius, to permit him to decline the interview; and, finding

all her efforts in vain, the poor woman retired into a convent, together

with her daughter, who had made a similar expedition with similar

results.(281) The mother of St. Marcus persuaded his abbot to command the

saint to go out to her. Placed in a dilemma between the sin of

disobedience and the perils of seeing his mother, St. Marcus extricated

himself by an ingenious device. He went to his mother with his face

disguised and his eyes shut. The mother did not recognise her son. The son

did not see his mother.(282) The sister of St. Pior in like manner induced

the abbot of that saint to command him to admit her to his presence. The

command was obeyed, but St. Pior resolutely kept his eyes shut during the

interview.(283) St. Pœmen and his six brothers had all deserted their

mother to cultivate the perfections of an ascetic life. But ingratitude

can seldom quench the love of a mother’s heart, and the old woman, now

bent by infirmities, went alone into the Egyptian desert to see once more

the children she so dearly loved. She caught sight of them as they were

about to leave their cell for the church, but they immediately ran back

into the cell, and, before her tottering steps could reach it, one of her

sons rushed forward and closed the door in her face. She remained outside

weeping bitterly. St. Pœmen then, coming to the door, but without opening

it, said, “Why do you, who are already stricken with age, pour forth such

cries and lamentations?” But she, recognising the voice of her son,

answered, “It is because I long to see you, my sons. What harm could it do

you that I should see you? Am I not your mother? did I not give you suck?

I am now an old and wrinkled woman, and my heart is troubled at the sound

of your voices.”(284) The saintly brothers, however, refused to open their

door. They told their mother that she would see them after death; and the

biographer says she at last went away contented with the prospect. St.

Simeon Stylites, in this as in other respects, stands in the first line.

He had been passionately loved by his parents, and, if we may believe his

eulogist and biographer, he began his saintly career by breaking the heart

of his father, who died of grief at his flight. His mother, however,

lingered on. Twenty-seven years after his disappearance, at a period when

his austerities had made him famous, she heard for the first time where he

was, and hastened to visit him. But all her labour was in vain. No woman

was admitted within the precincts of his dwelling, and he refused to

permit her even to look upon his face. Her entreaties and tears were

mingled with words of bitter and eloquent reproach.(285) “My son,” she is

represented as having said, “why have you done this? I bore you in my

womb, and you have wrung my soul with grief. I gave you milk from my

breast, you have filled my eyes with tears. For the kisses I gave you, you

have given me the anguish of a broken heart; for all that I have done and

suffered for you, you have repaid me by the most cruel wrongs.” At last

the saint sent a message to tell her that she would soon see him. Three

days and three nights she had wept and entreated in vain, and now,

exhausted with grief and age and privation, she sank feebly to the ground

and breathed her last sigh before that inhospitable door. Then for the

first time the saint, accompanied by his followers, came out. He shed some

pious tears over the corpse of his murdered mother, and offered up a

prayer consigning her soul to heaven. Perhaps it was but fancy, perhaps

life was not yet wholly extinct, perhaps the story is but the invention of

the biographer; but a faint motion—which appears to have been regarded as

miraculous—is said to have passed over her prostrate form. Simeon once

more commended her soul to heaven, and then, amid the admiring murmurs of

his disciples, the saintly matricide returned to his devotions.

The glaring mendacity that characterises the Lives of the Catholic Saints,

probably to a greater extent than any other important branch of existing

literature, makes it not unreasonable to hope that many of the foregoing

anecdotes represent much less events that actually took place than ideal

pictures generated by the enthusiasm of the chroniclers. They are not,

however, on that account the less significant of the moral conceptions

which the ascetic period had created. The ablest men in the Christian

community vied with one another in inculcating as the highest form of duty

the abandonment of social ties and the mortification of domestic

affections. A few faint restrictions were indeed occasionally made.

Much—on which I shall hereafter touch—was written on the liberty of

husbands and wives deserting one another; and something was written on the

cases of children forsaking or abandoning their parents. At first, those

who, when children, were devoted to the monasteries by their parents,

without their own consent, were permitted, when of mature age, to return

to the world; and this liberty was taken from them for the first time by

the fourth Council of Toledo, in A.D. 633.(286) The Council of Gangra

condemned the heretic Eustathius for teaching that children might, through

religious motives, forsake their parents, and St. Basil wrote in the same

strain;(287) but cases of this kind of rebellion against parental

authority were continually recounted with admiration in the Lives of the

Saints, applauded by some of the leading Fathers, and virtually sanctioned

by a law of Justinian, which deprived parents of the power of either

restraining their children from entering monasteries, or disinheriting

them if they had done so without their consent.(288) St. Chrysostom

relates with enthusiasm the case of a young man who had been designed by

his father for the army, and who was lured away to a monastery.(289) The

eloquence of St. Ambrose is said to have been so seductive, that mothers

were accustomed to shut up their daughters to guard them against his

fascinations.(290) The position of affectionate parents was at this time

extremely painful. The touching language is still preserved, in which the

mother of Chrysostom—who had a distinguished part in the conversion of her

son—implored him, if he thought it his duty to fly to the desert life, at

least to postpone the act till she had died.(291) St. Ambrose devoted a

chapter to proving that, while those are worthy of commendation who enter

the monasteries with the approbation, those are still more worthy of

praise who do so against the wishes, of their parents; and he proceeded to

show how small were the penalties the latter could inflict when compared

with the blessings asceticism could bestow.(292) Even before the law of

Justinian, the invectives of the clergy were directed against those who

endeavoured to prevent their children flying to the desert. St. Chrysostom

explained to them that they would certainly be damned.(293) St. Ambrose

showed that, even in this world, they might not be unpunished. A girl, he

tells us, had resolved to enter into a convent, and as her relations were

expostulating with her on her intention, one of those present tried to

move her by the memory of her dead father, asking whether, if he were

still alive, he would have suffered her to remain unmarried. “Perhaps,”

she calmly answered, “it was for this very purpose he died, that he should

not throw any obstacle in my way.” Her words were more than an answer;

they were an oracle. The indiscreet questioner almost immediately died,

and the relations, shocked by the manifest providence, desisted from their

opposition, and even implored the young saint to accomplish her

design.(294) St. Jerome tells with rapturous enthusiasm of a little girl,

named Asella, who, when only twelve years old, devoted herself to the

religious life and refused to look on the face of any man, and whose

knees, by constant prayer, became at last like those of a camel.(295) A

famous widow, named Paula, upon the death of her husband, deserted her

family, listened with “dry eyes” to her children, who were imploring her

to stay, fled to the society of the monks at Jerusalem, made it her desire

that “she might die a beggar, and leave not one piece of money to her

son,” and, having dissipated the whole of her fortune in charities,

bequeathed to her children only the embarrassment of her debts.(296) It

was carefully inculcated that all money given or bequeathed to the poor,

or to the monks, produced spiritual benefit to the donors or testators,

but that no spiritual benefit sprang from money bestowed upon relations;

and the more pious minds recoiled from disposing of their property in a

manner that would not redound to the advantage of their souls. Sometimes

parents made it a dying request to their children that they would preserve

none of their property, but would bestow it all among the poor.(297) It

was one of the most honourable incidents of the life of St. Augustine,

that he, like Aurelius, Bishop of Carthage, refused to receive legacies or

donations which unjustly spoliated the relatives of the benefactor.(298)

Usually, however, to outrage the affections of the nearest and dearest

relations was not only regarded as innocent, but proposed as the highest

virtue. “A young man,” it was acutely said, “who has learnt to despise a

mother’s grief, will easily bear any other labour that is imposed upon

him.”(299) St. Jerome, when exhorting Heliodorus to desert his family and

become a hermit, expatiated with a fond minuteness on every form of

natural affection he desired him to violate. “Though your little nephew

twine his arms around your neck; though your mother, with dishevelled hair

and tearing her robe asunder, point to the breast with which she suckled

you; though your father fall down on the threshold before you, pass on

over your father’s body. Fly with tearless eyes to the banner of the

cross. In this matter cruelty is the only piety.... Your widowed sister

may throw her gentle arms around you.... Your father may implore you to

wait but a short time to bury those near to you, who will soon be no more;

your weeping mother may recall your childish days, and may point to her

shrunken breast and to her wrinkled brow. Those around you may tell you

that all the household rests upon you. Such chains as these, the love of

God and the fear of hell can easily break. You say that Scripture orders

you to obey your parents, but he who loves them more than Christ loses his

soul. The enemy brandishes a sword to slay me. Shall I think of a mother’s

tears?”(300)

The sentiment manifested in these cases continued to be displayed in later

ages. Thus, St. Gregory the Great assures us that a certain young boy,

though he had enrolled himself as a monk, was unable to repress his love

for his parents, and one night stole out secretly to visit them. But the

judgment of God soon marked the enormity of the offence. On coming back to

the monastery, he died that very day, and when he was buried, the earth

refused to receive so heinous a criminal. His body was repeatedly thrown

up from the grave, and it was only suffered to rest in peace when St.

Benedict had laid the Sacrament upon its breast.(301) One nun revealed, it

is said, after death, that she had been condemned for three days to the

fires of purgatory, because she had loved her mother too much.(302) Of

another saint it is recorded that his benevolence was such that he was

never known to be hard or inhuman to any one except his relations.(303)

St. Romuald, the founder of the Camaldolites, counted his father among his

spiritual children, and on one occasion punished him by flagellation.(304)

The first nun whom St. Francis of Assisi enrolled was a beautiful girl of

Assisi named Clara Scifi, with whom he had for some time carried on a

clandestine correspondence, and whose flight from her father’s home he

both counselled and planned.(305) As the first enthusiasm of asceticism

died away, what was lost in influence by the father was gained by the

priest. The confessional made this personage the confidant in the most

delicate secrets of domestic life. The supremacy of authority, of

sympathy, and sometimes even of affection, passed away beyond the domestic

circle, and, by establishing an absolute authority over the most secret

thoughts and feelings of nervous and credulous women, the priests laid the

foundation of the empire of the world.