“By so much as God is far above our miserable selves, by so much is the contemplation of Him worthier of the Christian than that of his own person.  Oh! who is indeed so happy as to have wholly lost that self and to be perfectly absorbed in God!  But it pursues us, and when the soul fondly thinks itself already blended in union with the Most High it cries out ‘Here am I!’ and drags our nobler part down again into the dust.  It is bad enough that we must hinder the flight of the soul, and are forced to nourish and strengthen the perishable part of our being with bread and water and slothful sleep to the injury of the immortal part, however much we may fast and watch.  And shall we indulge the flesh, to the detriment of the spirit, by granting it any of its demands that can easily be denied?  Only he who despises and sacrifices his wretched self can, when he has lost his baser self by the Redeemer’s grace, find himself again in God.”

Hermas had listened patiently to the anchorite, but he now shook his head, and said:  “I cannot under stand either you or my father.  So long as I walk on this earth, I am I and no other.  After death, no doubt, but not till then, will a new and eternal life begin”

“Not so,” cried Paulus hastily, interrupting him.  “That other and higher life of which you speak, does not begin only after death for him who while still living does not cease from dying, from mortifying the flesh, and from subduing its lusts, from casting from him the world and his baser self, and from seeking the Lord.  It has been vouchsafed to many even in the midst of life to be born again to a higher existence.  Look at me, the basest of the base.  I am not two but one, and yet am I in the sight of the Lord as certainly another man than I was before grace found me, as this young shoot, which has grown from the roots of an overthrown palmtree is another tree than the rotten trunk.  I was a heathen and enjoyed every pleasure of the earth to the utmost; then I became a Christian; the grace of the Lord fell upon me, and I was born again, and became a child again; but this time—­the Redeemer be praised!—­the child of the Lord.  In the midst of life I died, I rose again, I found the joys of Heaven.  I had been Menander, and like unto Saul, I became Paulus.  All that Menander loved—­baths, feasts, theatres, horses and chariots, games in the arena, anointed limbs, roses and garlands, purple-garments, wine and the love of women—­lie behind me like some foul bog out of which a traveller has struggled with difficulty.  Not a vein of the old man survives in the new, and a new life has begun for me, mid-way to the grave; nor for me only, but for all pious men.  For you too the hour will sound, in which you will die to—­”

“If only I, like you, had been a Menander,” cried Hermas, sharply interrupting the speaker:  “How is it possible to cast away that which I never possessed?  In order to die one first must live.  This wretched life seems to me contemptible, and I am weary of running after you like a calf after a cow.  I am free-born, and of noble race, my father himself has told me so, and I am certainly no feebler in body than the citizens’ sons in the town with whom I went from the baths to the wrestling-school.”