bread and a little oil, wasted her body with fastings, dressed like a
servant, slept on a mat of straw, covered herself with haircloth, and
denied herself the pleasures to which she had been accustomed; she
would not even take a bath. The Catholic historians have unduly
magnified these virtues; but it was the type which piety then assumed,
arising in part from a too literal interpretation of the injunctions of
Christ. We are more enlightened in these times, since modern Christian
civilization seeks to solve the problem how far the pleasures of this
world may be reconciled with the pleasures of the world to come. But the
Christians of the fourth century were more austere, like the original
Puritans, and made but little account of pleasures which weaned them
from the contemplation of God and divine truth, and chained them to the
triumphal car of a material and infidel philosophy. As the great and
besetting sin of the Jews before the Captivity was idolatry, which thus
was the principal subject of rebuke from the messengers of
Omnipotence,--the one thing which the Jews were warned to avoid; as
hypocrisy and Pharisaism and a technical and legal piety were the
greatest vices to be avoided when Christ began his teachings,--so
Epicureanism in life and philosophy was the greatest evil with which the
early Christians had to contend, and which the more eminent among them
sought to shun, like Athanasius, Basil, and Chrysostom. The asceticism
of the early Church was simply the protest against that materialism
which was undermining society and preparing the way to ruin; and hence
the loftiest type of piety assumed the form of deadly antagonism to the
luxuries and self-indulgence which pervaded every city of the empire.

This antagonism may have been carried too far, even as the Puritan made
war on many innocent pleasures; but the spectacle of a self-indulgent
and pleasure-seeking Christian was abhorrent to the piety of those
saints who controlled the opinions of the Christian world. The world was