§ 3-i. INFLUENCE AND EFFECT OF MONASTICISM. 177
laud, and even in the northern regions of Scotland and Sweden, encounters innumerable traces of useful monastic labors in the ruins of abbeys, of chapter houses, of convents, of priories and hermitages, from which once proceeded educational and missionary influences upon the surrounding hills and forests. Tliese oflices, hov/ever, to the progress of arts and letters were only accessory, often involuntary, and altogether foreign to the intention of the founders of monastic life and institutions, who looked exclusively to the religious and moral education of the soul. In seeking first the kingdom of heaven, these other things were added to them.
But on the other hand, monasticism withdi-ew from society many useful forces; diffused an indiffeience for the family life,\ the civil and military service of the state, and all public practical operations ; turned the channels of religion from the \ world into the desert, and so hastened the decline of Egypt, \ Syria, Palestine, and the whole Roman empire. It nourished religious fanaticism, often raised storms of popular agitation, and rushed passionately into the controversies of theological parties ; generally, it is true, on the side of orthodoxy, but often, as at the Ephesian " council of robbers," in favor of heresy, and especially in behalf of the crudest superstition. For the simple, divine way of salvation in the gospel, it substituted an arbitrary, eccentric, ostentatious, and pretentious sanctity. It darkened the all-sufficient merits of Christ by the glitter of the over-meritorious works of man. It measured virtue by the quantity of outward exercises instead of the quality of the inward disposition, and disseminated sclf-j-ighteousness and an anxious, legal, and mechanical religion. It favored the idolatrous veneration of Mary and of saints, the worship of images and relics, and all sorts of superstitious and pious fraud. It circulated a mass of visions and miracles, which, if true, fur surpassed the miracles of Christ and the apostles and set all the laws of nature and reason at defiance. The Nicene age is full of the most absurd monks' fables, and is in this res})ect not a whit behind the darkest of the middle ages.' Monasticism
' The monkish miracles, with which the Vitce Patrum of the .Jesuit Rosweydo aB'l the Acta Sanctorum swarm, often contradict all the laws of nature and of rca
178 TUmD PERIOD. A.D. 311-590.
lowered tlie standard of general morality in pro])ortion as it se* itself above it and claimed a corresponding liigher merit ; and it exerted in general a demoi-alizing influence on the people, who came to consider themselves the profaiium vidgus nvundi^ and to live accordingly. Hence the freqnent lamentations, not only of Salvian, hut of Chrysostom and of Augustine, over the indifierence and laxness of the Chrstianity of the day ; hence
sou, and would be hardly worthy of meutio!!, but that they come from such fatheis as Jerome, Rufinus, Severus, Palladium, and Theodoret, and go to characteri/e tiie Nicene age. We are far from rejecting all and every one as falsehood and deception, and accepting the judgment of Isaac Taylor (Ancient Christianity, ii. 10(j) : "The Nicene miracles are of a kind which shocks every sentiment of gravity, of decency, and of piety : — in their obvious features they are childish, horrid, blasphemous, and foul." Much more cautious is the opuiion of Kobertson (Hist, of the Christian Church, i. 312) and other Protestant historians, who suppose that, together with the innocent illusions of a heated imagination and the fabrications of intentional fraud, there must have been also much that was real, though in the nature of the case an exact sifting is impossible. But many of these stories are too much even for Roman credulity, and are either entirely omitted or at least greatly reduced and modified by critical historians. We read not only of inuumeiable visions, pro[ihecies, healings of the sick and the possessed, but also of raising of the dead (as in (ho life of M;utin of Tours), of the growth of a dry stick into a fruitful tree, and of a monk's passing unseared, in absolute obedience to his abbot, through a furnace of lire as through a cooling bath. (Conip. Sulp. Sever. Dial. i. c. 12 and 13.) Even wild beasts phiy a large part, and are transformed into rational servants of the Egyptian saints of the desert. At the funeral of Paul of Thebes, accoiding to Jerome, two lions voluntarily performed the office of sexton. Pachomiud walked unharmed over serpents and scorpions, and crossed the Nile on crocodiles, which, of their own accord, presented their backs. The younger Macarius, or (according to other statements of the Historia Lausiaca ; comp. the iuvcstigatiou of Tillemont, torn. viii. p. 811 s(iq.) the monk Marcus stood on so good terms with the beasts, that a hyena (according to Rufinu.s, V. P. ii. 4, it was a lioness) brought her young one to him in liis cell, that ho miglit open its eyes ; which he did by prayer and application of Brittle ; and the next day she offered him, for gratitude, a large sheepskin ; the saint at iirpt declined the gift, and reproved the beast for the double crime of murder and theft, by which she had obtained the skin ; but when the hyena showed rc[)cntance. and with a nod promised amendment, Macarius took the skin, and afterward I'lqueathed it to the great bishop Athanasius. Severus (Dial. i. c. 'J) gives a very similar account of an unknown anchoret, but, like Rufinus, substitutes for the hyena of Palladius a lioness wi*,h live whelps, and makes the saint receive the present of the skin without scruple or reproof. Shortly before (c. 8), he speaks, however, of a woll', which once robbed a friendly hermit, whose evening meal she was accustomo*', to shaie, showed deep repentance for it, and with bowed head begged forgivcnesa of the saint. Perhaps Palladius or his Latin translator has combined these 'w<* ■mecdotcs.