They revel in the wildest eccentricities with none to molest or make afraid, always excepting the black demons from the spiritual world.  One dwells in a cave in the bowels of the earth; one lies on the sand beneath a blazing sun; one has shut himself forever from the sight of man in a miserable hut among the bleak rocks of yonder projecting peak; one rests with joy in the marshes, breathing with gratitude the pestilential vapors.

Some of these saints became famous for piety and miraculous power.  Athanasius, fleeing from persecution, visited them, and Jerome sought them out to learn from their own lips the stories of their lives.  To these men and to others we are indebted for much of our knowledge concerning this chapter of man’s history.  Less than fifty years after Paul of Thebes died, or about 375 A.D., Jerome wrote the story of his life, which Schaff justly characterizes as “a pious romance.”  From Jerome we gather the following account:  Paul was the real founder of the hermit life, although not the first to bear the name.  During the Decian persecution, when churches were laid waste and Christians were slain with barbarous cruelty, Paul and his sister were bereaved of both their parents.  He was then a lad of sixteen, an inheritor of wealth and skilled for one of his years in Greek and Egyptian learning.  He was of a gentle and loving disposition.  On account of his riches he was denounced as a Christian by an envious brother-in-law and compelled to flee to the mountains in order to save his life.  He took up his abode in a cave shaded by a palm that afforded him food and clothing.  “And that no one may deem this impossible,” affirms Jerome, “I call to witness Jesus and his holy angels that I have seen and still see in that part of the desert which lies between Syria and the Saracens’ country, monks of whom one was shut up for thirty years and lived on barley bread and muddy water, while another in an old cistern kept himself alive on five dried figs a day.”

It is impossible to determine how much of the story which follows is historically true.  Undoubtedly, it contains little worthy of belief, but it gives us some faint idea of how these hermits lived.  Its chief value consists in the fact that it preserves a fragment of the monastic literature of the times—­a story which was once accepted as a credible narrative.  Imagine the influence of such a tale, when believed to be true, upon a mind inclined to embrace the doctrines of asceticism.  Its power at that time is not to be measured by its reliability now.  Jerome himself declares in the prologue that many incredible things were related of Paul which he will not repeat.  After reading the following story, the reader may well inquire what more fanciful tale could be produced even by a writer of fiction.