possible, to eradicate the passions and appetites which enslave the body; and this was to be done by self-flagellations, penances, austerities, and solitude,—­flight from the contaminating influences of the world.  All Oriental piety assumed this ascetic form.  The transition was easy to the sundering of domestic ties, to the suppression of natural emotions and social enjoyments.  The devotee became austere, cold, inhuman, unsocial.  He shunned the habitations of men.  And the more desirous he was to essay a high religious life and thus rise in favor with God, the more severe and revengeful and unforgiving he made the Deity he adored,—­not a compassionate Creator and Father, but an irresistible Power bent on his destruction.  This degrading view of the Deity, borrowed from Paganism, tinged the subsequent theology of the Christian monks, and entered largely into the theology of the Middle Ages.

Such was the prevailing philosophy, or theosophy—­both lofty and degraded—­with which the Christian convert had to contend; not merely the shameless vices of the people, so open and flagrant as to call out disgust and indignation, but also the views which the more virtuous and religious of Pagan saints accepted and promulgated:  and not saints alone, but those who made the greatest pretension to intellectual culture, like the Gnostics and Manicheans; those men who were the first to ensnare Saint Augustine,—­specious, subtle, sophistical, as acute as the Brahmins of India.  It was Eastern philosophy, false as we regard it, which created the most powerful institution that existed in Europe for above a thousand years,—­an institution which all the learning and eloquence of the Reformers of the sixteenth century could not subvert, except in Protestant countries.

Now what, more specifically, were the ideas which the early monks borrowed from India, Persia, and Egypt, which ultimately took such a firm hold of the European mind?

One was the superior virtue of a life devoted to purely religious contemplation, and for the same end that animated the existence of fakirs and sofis.  It was to escape the contaminating influence of matter, to rise above the wants of the body, to exterminate animal passions and appetites, to hide from a world which luxury corrupted.  The Christian recluses were thus led to bury themselves in cells among the mountains and deserts, in dreary and uncomfortable caverns, in isolated retreats far from the habitation of men,—­yea, among wild beasts, clothing themselves in their skins and eating their food, in order to commune with God more effectually, and propitiate His favor.  Their thoughts were diverted from the miseries which they ought to have alleviated and the ignorance which they ought to have removed, and were concentrated upon themselves, not upon their relatives and neighbors.  The cries of suffering humanity were disregarded in a vain attempt to practise doubtful virtues.  How much good those pious recluses