The Christians stepped far out beyond philosophy; without speculating on the why, they felt that indulgence of animal passion did, in fact, pollute them, and so much the more, the more it was deliberate.  Philosophy, gliding into Manicheism, divided the forces of the universe, giving the spirit to God, but declaring matter to be eternally and incurably evil; and looking forward to the time when the spirit should be emancipated from the body, as the beginning of, or as the return to, its proper existence, took no especial care what became the meanwhile of its evil tenement of flesh.  If it sinned, sin was its element; it could not do other than sin; purity of conduct could not make the body clean, and no amount of bodily indulgence could shed a taint upon the spirit—­a very comfortable doctrine, and one which, under various disguises, has appeared a good many times on the earth.  But Christianity, shaking it all off, would present the body to God as a pure and holy sacrifice, as so much of the material world conquered from the appetites and lusts, and from the devil whose abode they were.  This was the meaning of the fastings and scourgings, the penances and night-watchings; it was this which sent St. Anthony to the tombs and set Simeon on his pillar, to conquer the devil in the flesh, and keep themselves, if possible, undefiled by so much as one corrupt thought.

And they may have been absurd and extravagant; when the feeling is stronger than the judgment, men are very apt to be so.  If, in the recoil from Manicheism, they conceived that a body of a saint thus purified had contracted supernatural virtue and could work miracles, they had not sufficiently attended to the facts, and so far are not unexceptionable witnesses to them.  Nevertheless they did their work, and in virtue of it we are raised to a higher stage, we are lifted forward a mighty step which we can never again retrace.  Personal purity is not the whole for which we have to care, it is but one feature in the ideal character of man.  The monks may have thought it was all, or more nearly all than it is; and therefore their lives may seem to us poor, mean, and emasculate.  Yet it is with life as it is with science; generations of men have given themselves exclusively to single branches, which, when mastered, form but a little section in a cosmic philosophy; and in life, so slow is progress, it may take a thousand years to make good a single step.  Weary and tedious enough it seems when we cease to speak in large language, and remember the numbers of individual souls who have been at work at it; but who knows whereabouts we are in the duration of the race?  Are we crawling out of the cradle, or are we tottering into the gave?  In nursery, in schoolroom, or in opening manhood?  Who knows?  It is enough for us to be sure of our steps when we have taken them, and thankfully to accept what has been done for us.  Henceforth it is impossible for us to give our unmixed admiration to any character which moral shadows overhang.  Henceforth we require not greatness only, but goodness; and not that goodness only which begins and ends in conduct correctly regulated, but that love of goodness, that keen pure feeling for it, which resides in a conscience as sensitive and susceptible as woman’s modesty.