But this unnatural, unwise retirement was not the worst evil in the life of a primitive monk, with all its dreamy contemplation and silent despair.  It was accompanied with the most painful austerities,—­self-inflicted scourgings, lacerations, dire privations, to propitiate an angry deity, or to bring the body into a state which would be insensible to pain, or to exorcise passions which the imaginations inflamed.  All this was based on penance,—­ self-expiation,—­which entered so largely into the theogonies of the East, and which gave a gloomy form to the piety of the Middle Ages.  This error was among the first to kindle the fiery protests of Luther.  The repudiation of this error, and of its logical sequences, was one of the causes of the Reformation.  This error cast its dismal shadow on the common life of the Middle Ages.  You cannot penetrate the spirit of those centuries without a painful recognition of almost universal darkness and despair.  How gloomy was a Gothic church before the eleventh century, with its dark and heavy crypt, its narrow windows, its massive pillars, its low roof, its cold, damp pavement, as if men went into that church to hide themselves and sing mournful songs,—­the Dies Irae of monastic fear!

But the primitive monks, with all their lofty self-sacrifices and efforts for holy meditation, towards the middle of the fourth century, as their number increased from the anarchies and miseries of a falling empire, became quarrelsome, sometimes turbulent, and generally fierce and fanatical.  They had to be governed.  They needed some master mind to control them, and confine them to their religious duties.  Then arose Basil, a great scholar, and accustomed to civilized life in the schools of Athens and Constantinople, who gave rules and laws to the monks, gathered them into communities and discouraged social isolation, knowing that the demons had more power over men when they were alone and idle.

This Basil was an extraordinary man.  His ancestors were honorable and wealthy.  He moved in the highest circle of social life, like Chrysostom.  He was educated in the most famous schools.  He travelled extensively like other young men of rank.  His tutor was the celebrated Libanius, the greatest rhetorician of the day.  He exhausted Antioch, Caesarea, and Constantinople, and completed his studies at Athens, where he formed a famous friendship with Gregory Nazianzen, which was as warm and devoted as that between Cicero and Atticus:  these young men were the talk and admiration of Athens.  Here, too, he was intimate with young Julian, afterwards the “Apostate” Emperor of Rome.  Basil then visited the schools of Alexandria, and made the acquaintance of the great Athanasius, as well as of those monks who sought a retreat amid Egyptian solitudes.  Here his conversion took place, and he parted with his princely patrimony for the benefit of the poor.  He then entered the Church, and was successively ordained deacon and priest, while