going down into the bottomless pit of classical decadence, were stirred by controversies over prepositions and conjunctions.  But if we remember that in all of it, the men who are sometimes ridiculed as mere ascetics, mere pedants, were moved by a profound sense of their duty to save a world so demoralized, so shameless in the pursuit of everything sensual and base, that nothing short of their sublime enthusiasm, their very madness of contempt for the material and the sensual, could have saved it.

After studying in Constantinople and in Athens, the spirit of the Reformers of his time took hold on Basil and, under the ascetic impulse, he visited the hermits of Arabia and Asia Minor, hoping to learn sanctity from them.  He founded a convent in Pontus, which his mother and sister entered.  After his ordination as “Presbyter.” he was involved in the great Arian controversy, and the ability he showed as a disputant probably had much to do with his promotion to the bishopric of Caesarea.  In meeting the responsibilities of that office, his courage and eloquence made him famous.  When threatened by the Emperor Valens, he replied that having nothing but a few books and his cloak, he did not fear confiscation of his goods; that he could not be exiled, since the whole earth was the Lord’s; that torture and death would merely put an end to his labors and bring him nearer to the God for whom he longed.  He died at Caesarea A. D. 379.  Such men must be judged from their own standpoints.  It is worth much to understand them.

The sermon ‘To the Fallen,’ here used from Fish’s translation, was greatly admired by Fenelon, who calls it a masterpiece.  It was occasioned by a nun’s breaking a vow of perpetual virginity.

ON A RECREANT NUN

It is time, now, to take up the exclamation of the Prophet:  “O that my head were waters, and mine eyes a fountain of tears, that I might weep for the wounded of the daughter of my people!”—­Jer. ix. i.

For, although they are wrapped in profound silence, and lie quite stupefied by their calamity, and deprived, by their deadly wound, even of the very sense of suffering, yet it does not become us to withhold our tears over so sad a fall.  For if Jeremiah deemed those worthy of countless lamentations who had received bodily wounds in battle, what shall we say when souls are involved in so great a calamity?  “Thy wounded,” says the Prophet, “are not wounded with the sword, and thy dead are not the dead of war.”  But my lamentation is for grievous sin, the sting of the true death, and for the fiery darts of the wicked, which have cruelly kindled a flame in both body and soul.  Well might the laws of God groan within themselves, beholding such pollution on earth, those laws which always utter their loud prohibition, saying in olden time, “Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s wife”; and in the Gospels, “That whosoever looketh on a woman to lust after