But if their life was easy, it was surely not ill-spent. If having
few wants, and those soon supplied, they found too much time for the
luxury of quiet thought, those need not blame them, who having many
wants, and those also easily supplied, are wont to spend their
superfluous leisure in any luxury save that of thought, above all
save that of thought concerning God. For it was upon God that these
men, whatever their defects or ignorances may have been, had set
their minds. That man was sent into the world to know and to love,
to obey and thereby to glorify, the Maker of his being, was the
cardinal point of their creed, as it has been of every creed which
ever exercised any beneficial influence on the minds of men. Dean
Milman in his "History of Christianity," vol. iii. page 294, has,
while justly severe upon the failings and mistakes of the Eastern
monks, pointed out with equal justice that the great desire of
knowing God was the prime motive in the mind of all their best men:-
-

"In some regions of the East, the sultry and oppressive heat, the
general relaxation of the physical system, dispose constitutions of
a certain temperament to a dreamy inertness. The indolence and
prostration of the body produce a kind of activity in the mind, if
that may properly be called activity which is merely giving loose to
the imagination and the emotions as they follow out the wild train
of incoherent thought, or are agitated by impulses of spontaneous
and ungoverned feeling. Ascetic Christianity ministered new aliment
to this common propensity. It gave an object, both vague and
determinate enough to stimulate, yet never to satisfy or exhaust.
The regularity of stated hours of prayer, and of a kind of idle
industry, weaving mats or plaiting baskets, alternated with periods
of morbid reflection on the moral state of the soul, and of mystic