Chastity manifested itself in primitive Christianity in two different though not necessarily opposed ways.  On the one hand it took a stern and practical form in vigorous men and women who, after being brought up in a society permitting a high degree of sexual indulgence, suddenly found themselves convinced of the sin of such indulgence.  The battle with the society they had been born into, and with their own old impulses and habits, became so severe that they often found themselves compelled to retire from the world altogether.  Thus it was that the parched solitudes of Egypt were peopled with hermits largely occupied with the problem of subduing their own flesh.  Their pre-occupation, and indeed the pre-occupation of much early Christian literature, with sexual matters, may be said to be vastly greater than was the case with the pagan society they had left.  Paganism accepted sexual indulgence and was then able to dismiss it, so that in classic literature we find very little insistence on sexual details except in writers like Martial, Juvenal and Petronius who introduce them mainly for satirical ends.  But the Christians could not thus escape from the obsession of sex; it was ever with them.  We catch interesting glimpses of their struggles, for the most part barren struggles, in the Epistles of St. Jerome, who had himself been an athlete in these ascetic contests.

“Oh, how many times,” wrote St. Jerome to Eustochium, the virgin to whom he addressed one of the longest and most interesting of his letters, “when in the desert, in that vast solitude which, burnt up by the heart of the sun, offers but a horrible dwelling to monks, I imagined myself among the delights of Rome!  I was alone, for my soul was full of bitterness.  My limbs were covered by a wretched sack and my skin was as black as an Ethiopian’s.  Every day I wept and groaned, and if I was unwillingly overcome by sleep my lean body lay on the bare earth.  I say nothing of my food and drink, for in the desert even invalids have no drink but cold water, and cooked food is regarded as a luxury.  Well, I, who, out of fear of hell, had condemned myself to this prison, companion of scorpions and wild beasts, often seemed in imagination among bands of girls.  My face was pale with fasting and my mind within my frigid body was burning with desire; the fires of lust would still flare up in a body that already seemed to be dead.  Then, deprived of all help, I threw myself at the feet of Jesus, washing them with my tears and drying them with my hair, subjugating my rebellious flesh by long fasts.  I remember that more than once I passed the night uttering cries and striking my breast until God sent me peace.”  “Our century,” wrote St. Chrysostom in his Discourse to Those Who Keep Virgins in Their Houses, “has seen many men who have bound their bodies with chains, clothed themselves in sacks, retired to the summits of mountains where they have lived in constant vigil and fasting, giving the example