"Well said. Go to that window and leap forth into the court." Philammon
walked to it and opened it. The pavement was fully twenty feet below,
but his business was to obey and not to take measurements. There was a
flower in a vase upon the sill. He quietly removed it, and in an instant
would have leaped for life or death, when Cyril's voice
thundered, "Stop!"

The Pachomian monks despised possessions of every kind. The following
pathetic incident shows the frightful extent to which they carried this
principle, and also illustrates the character of that submission to
which the novitiate voluntarily assented: Cassian described how Mutius
sold his possessions and with his little child of eight asked admission
to a monastery. The monks received but disciplined him. "He had already
forgotten that he was rich, he must forget that he was a father." His
child was taken, clothed in rags, beaten and spurned. Obedience
compelled the father to look upon his child wasting with pain and grief,
but such was his love for Christ, says the narrator, that his heart was
rigid and immovable. He was then told to throw the boy into the river,
but was stopped in the act of obeying.

Yet men, women, and even children, coveted this life of unnatural
deprivations. "Posterity," says Gibbon, "might repeat the saying which
had formerly been applied to the sacred animals of the same country,
that in Egypt it was less difficult to find a god than a man." Though
the hermit did not claim to be a god, yet there were more monks in many
monasteries than inhabitants in the neighboring villages. Pachomius had
fourteen hundred monks in his own monastery and seven thousand under his
rule. Jerome says fifty thousand monks were sometimes assembled at
Easter in the deserts of Nitria. It was not uncommon for an abbot to
command five thousand monks. St. Serapion boasted of ten thousand.