The vow of Chastity was equally a protest against one of the characteristic vices of the day, as well as a Christian virtue.  Luxury and pleasure-seeking lives had relaxed the restraints of home and the virtues of earlier days.  The evils of concubinage were shameless and open throughout the empire, which led to a low estimate of female virtue and degraded the sex.  The pagan poets held up woman as a subject of scorn and scarcasm.  On no subject were the apostles more urgent in their exhortations than to a life of purity.  To no greater temptation were the converts to Christianity subjected than the looseness of prevailing sentiments in reference to this vice.  It stared everybody in the face.  Basil took especial care to guard the monks from this prevailing iniquity, and made chastity a transcendent and fundamental virtue.  He aimed to remove the temptation to sin.  The monks were enjoined to shun the very presence of women.  If they carried the system of non-intercourse too far, and became hard and unsympathetic, it was to avoid the great scandal of the age,—­a still greater evil.  To the monk was denied even the blessing of the marriage ties.  Celibacy became a fundamental law of monachism.  It was not to cement a spiritual despotism that Basil forbade marriage, but to attain a greater sanctity,—­for a monk was consecrated to what was supposed to be the higher life.  This law of celibacy was abused, and gradually was extended to all the clergy, secular as well as regular, but not till the clergy were all subordinated to the rule of an absolute Pope.  It is the fate of all human institutions to become corrupt; but no institution of the Church has been so fatally perverted as that pertaining to the marriage of the clergy.  Founded to promote purity of personal life, it was used to uphold the arms of spiritual despotism.  It was the policy of Hildebrand.

The vow of Obedience, again, was made in special reference to the disintegration of society, when laws were feebly enforced and a central power was passing away.  The discipline even of armies was relaxed.  Mobs were the order of the day, even in imperial cities.  Moreover, monks had long been insubordinate; they obeyed no head, except nominally; they were with difficulty ruled in their communities.  Therefore obedience was made a cardinal virtue, as essential to the very existence of monastic institutions.  I need not here allude to the perversion of this rule,—­how it degenerated into a fearful despotism, and was made use of by ambitious popes, and finally by the generals of the Mendicant Friars and the Jesuits.  All the rules of Basil were perverted from their original intention; but in his day they were called for.