The story of John, surnamed Chrysostom, who was born at Antioch, in 347, is exceedingly interesting.  He was a young lawyer, who entered the priesthood after his baptism.  He at once set his heart on the monastic life, but his mother took him to her chamber, and, by the bed where she had given him birth, besought him in fear, not to forsake her.  “My son,” she said in substance, “my only comfort in the midst of the miseries of this earthly life is to see thee constantly, and to behold in thy traits the faithful image of my beloved husband, who is no more.  When you have buried me and joined my ashes with those of your father, nothing will then prevent you from retiring into the monastic life.  But so long as I breathe, support me by your presence, and do not draw down upon you the wrath of God by bringing such evils upon me who have given you no offence.”  This singularly tender petition was granted, but Chrysostom turned his home into a monastery, slept on the bare floor, ate little and seldom, and prayed much by day and by night.

After his mother’s death Chrysostom enjoyed the seclusion of a monastic solitude for six years, but impairing his health by excessive self-mortification he returned to Antioch in 380.  He rapidly rose to a position of commanding influence in the church.  His peerless oratorical and literary gifts were employed in elevating the ascetic ideal and in unsparing denunciations of the worldly religion of the imperial court.  He incurred the furious hatred of the young and beautiful Empress Eudoxia, who united her influence with that of the ambitious Theophilus, patriarch of Alexandria, and Chrysostom was banished from Constantinople, but died on his way to the remote desert of Pityus.  His powerful sermons and valuable writings contributed in no small degree to the spread of monasticism among the Christians of his time.

Then there was Augustine, the greatest thinker since Plato.  “We shall meet him,” says Schaff, “alike on the broad highways and the narrow foot-paths, on the giddy Alpine heights and in the awful depths of speculation, wherever philosophical thinkers before him or after him have trod.”  He, too, like all the other leaders of thought in his time, was ascetic in his habits.  Although he lived and labored for thirty-eight years at Hippo, a Numidian city about two hundred miles west of Carthage, in Africa, Augustine was regarded as the intellectual head not only of North Africa but of Western Christianity.  He gathered his clergy into a college of priests, with a community of goods, thus approaching as closely to the regular monastic life as was possible to secular clergymen.  He established religious houses and wrote a set of rules, consisting of twenty-four articles, for the government of monasteries.  These rules were superseded by those of Benedict, but they were resuscitated under Charlemagne and reappeared in the famous Austin Canons of the eleventh century.  Little did Augustine think that a thousand years later an Augustinian monk—­Luther—­would abandon his order to become the founder of modern Protestantism.