which go to prove that from the time that St. Paul had declared the
great truth that in Christ Jesus was neither bond nor free, and had
proclaimed the spiritual brotherhood of all men in Christ, slavery,
as an institution, was doomed to slow but certain death. But that
death was accelerated by the monastic movement, wherever it took
root. A class of men who came not to be ministered unto, but to
minister to others; who prided themselves upon needing fewer
luxuries than the meanest slaves; who took rank among each other and
among men not on the ground of race, nor of official position, nor
of wealth, nor even of intellect, but simply on the ground of
virtue, was a perpetual protest against slavery and tyranny of every
kind; a perpetual witness to the world that, whether all men were
equal or not in the sight of God, the only rank among them of which
God would take note, would be their rank in goodness.



BASIL



On the south shore of the Black Sea, eastward of Sinope, there dwelt
in those days, at the mouth of the River Iris, a hermit as gentle
and as pure as Ephrem of Edessa. Beside a roaring waterfall, amid
deep glens and dark forests, with distant glimpses of the stormy sea
beyond, there lived on bread and water a graceful gentleman, young
and handsome; a scholar too, who had drunk deeply at the fountains
of Pagan philosophy and poetry, and had been educated with care at
Constantinople and at Athens, as well as at his native city of
Caesaraea, in the heart of Asia Minor, now dwindled under Turkish