only in dark hints, the reason why the Arab tribes around once rose
and laid waste six churches with their monasteries in the
neighbourhood of Scetis. St. Jerome in like manner does not
hesitate to pour out bitter complaints against many of the monks in
the neighbourhood of Bethlehem. It is notorious, too, that many
became monks merely to escape slavery, hunger, or conscription into
the army: Unruly and fanatical spirits, too, grew fond of
wandering. Bands of monks on the great roads and public places of
the empire, Massalians or Gyrovagi, as they were called, wandered
from province to province, and cell to cell, living on the alms
which they extorted from the pious, and making up too often for
protracted fasts by outbursts of gluttony and drunkenness. And
doubtless the average monk, even when well-conducted himself and in
a well-conducted monastery, was, like average men of every creed,
rank, or occupation, a very common-place person, acting from very
mixed and often very questionable motives; and valuing his shaven
crown and his sheepskin cloak, his regular hours of prayer and his
implicit obedience to his abbot, more highly than he valued the fear
and the love of God.

It is so in every creed. With some, even now, the strict observance
of the Sabbath; with others, outward reverence at the Holy
Communion; with others, the frequent hearing of sermons which suit
heir own views; with others, continual reading of pious books (on
the lessons of which they do not act), covers, instead of charity, a
multitude of sins. But the saint, abbot, or father among these
hermits was essentially the man who was not a common-place person;
who was more than an ascetic, and more than a formalist; who could
pierce beyond the letter to the spirit, and see, beyond all forms of
doctrine or modes of life, that virtue was the one thing needful.