When, in my journey through Arabia Petraea, I saw the caves of the
anchorites of Sinai with my own eyes and trod their soil with my own
feet, that story recurred to my mind and did not cease to haunt me while
I travelled on farther in the desert.

A soul's problem of the most exceptional type seemed to me to be offered
by the simple course of this little history.

An anchorite, falsely accused instead of another, takes his punishment
of expulsion on himself without exculpating himself, and his innocence
becomes known only through the confession of the real culprit.

There was a peculiar fascination in imagining what the emotions of a soul
might be which could lead to such apathy, to such an annihilation of all
sensibility; and while the very deeds and thoughts of the strange cave-
dweller grew more and more vivid in my mind the figure of Paulus took
form, as it were as an example, and soon a crowd of ideas gathered round
it, growing at last to a distinct entity, which excited and urged me on
till I ventured to give it artistic expression in the form of a
narrative. I was prompted to elaborate this subject--which had long been
shaping itself to perfect conception in my mind as ripe material for a
romance--by my readings in Coptic monkish annals, to which I was led
by Abel's Coptic studies; and I afterwards received a further stimulus
from the small but weighty essay by H. Weingarten on the origin of
monasticism, in which I still study the early centuries of Christianity,
especially in Egypt.

This is not the place in which to indicate the points on which I feel
myself obliged to differ from Weingarten. My acute fellow-laborer at
Breslau clears away much which does not deserve to remain, but in many