of the most austere discipline and forbidding all women to cross the thresholds of their humble dwellings; and yet, in spite of all the severities they have exercised on themselves, it was with difficulty they could repress the fury of their passions.”  Hilarion, says Jerome, saw visions of naked women when he lay down on his solitary couch and delicious meats when he sat down to his frugal table.  Such experiences rendered the early saints very scrupulous.  “They used to say,” we are told in an interesting history of the Egyptian anchorites, Palladius’s Paradise of the Holy Fathers, belonging to the fourth century (A.W.  Budge, The Paradise, vol. ii, p. 129), “that Abba Isaac went out and found the footprint of a woman on the road, and he thought about it in his mind and destroyed it saying, ’If a brother seeth it he may fall.’” Similarly, according to the rules of St. Caesarius of Aries for nuns, no male clothing was to be taken into the convent for the purpose of washing or mending.  Even in old age, a certain anxiety about chastity still remained.  One of the brothers, we are told in The Paradise (p. 132) said to Abba Zeno, “Behold thou hast grown old, how is the matter of fornication?” The venerable saint replied, “It knocketh, but it passeth on.”

As the centuries went by the same strenuous anxiety to guard chastity still remained, and the old struggle constantly reappeared (see, e.g., Migne’s Dictionnaire d’Ascetisme, art.  “Demon, Tentation du").  Some saints, it is true, like Luigi di Gonzaga, were so angelically natured that they never felt the sting of sexual desire.  These seem to have been the exception.  St. Benedict and St. Francis experienced the difficulty of subduing the flesh.  St. Magdalena de Pozzi, in order to dispel sexual desires, would roll on thorny bushes till the blood came.  Some saints kept a special cask of cold water in their cells to stand in (Lea, Sacerdotal Celibacy, vol. i, p. 124).  On the other hand, the Blessed Angela de Fulginio tells us in her Visiones (cap.  XIX) that, until forbidden by her confessor, she would place hot coals in her secret parts, hoping by material fire to extinguish the fire of concupiscence.  St. Aldhelm, the holy Bishop of Sherborne, in the eighth century, also adopted a homeopathic method of treatment, though of a more literal kind, for William of Malmsbury states that when tempted by the flesh he would have women to sit and lie by him until he grew calm again; the method proved very successful, for the reason, it was thought, that the Devil felt he had been made a fool of.

In time the Catholic practice and theory of asceticism became more formalized and elaborated, and its beneficial effects were held to extend beyond the individual himself.  “Asceticism from the Christian point of view,” writes Brenier de Montmorand in an interesting study ("Ascetisme et Mysticisme,” Revue Philosophique,