The Historia Lausiaca and the Pratum Spirituale have many a story
and many a saying as weighty, beautiful, and instructive now as they
were fifteen hundred years ago; stories which show that graces and
virtues such as the world had never seen before, save in the
persecuted and half-unknown Christians of the first three centuries,
were cultivated to noble fruitfulness by the monks of the East. For
their humility, obedience, and reverence for their superiors it is
not wise to praise them just now; for those are qualities which are
not at present considered virtues, but rather (save by the soldier)
somewhat abject vices; and indeed they often carried them, as they
did their abstinence, to an extravagant pitch. But it must be
remembered, in fairness, that if they obeyed their supposed
superiors, they had first chosen their superiors themselves; that as
the becoming a monk at all was an assertion of self-will and
independence, whether for good or evil, so their reverence for their
abbots was a voluntary loyalty to one who they fancied had a right
to rule them, because he was wiser and better than they; a feeling
which some have found not degrading, but ennobling; and the parent,
not of servility, but of true freedom. And as for the obsolete
virtue of humility, that still remains true which a voice said to
Antony, when he saw the snares which were spread over the whole
earth, and asked, sighing, "Who can pass safely over these?" and the
voice answered, "Humility alone."

For the rest, if the Sermon on the Mount mean anything, as a
practical rule of life for Christian men, then these monks were
surely justified in trying to obey it, for to obey it they surely
tried.