out in the East, and it cannot be denied that, as the years went on,
the hermit life took a form less and less practical, and more and
more repulsive also. Such men as Antony, Hilarion, Basil, had
valued the ascetic training, not so much because it had, as they
thought, a merit in itself, but because it enabled the spirit to
rise above the flesh; because it gave them strength to conquer their
passions and appetites, and leave their soul free to think and act.

But their disciples, especially in Syria, seem to have attributed
more and more merit to the mere act of inflicting want and suffering
on themselves. Their souls were darkened, besides, more and more,
by a doctrine unknown to the Bible, unknown to the early Christians,
and one which does not seem to have had any strong hold of the mind
of Antony himself--namely, that sins committed after baptism could
only be washed away by tears, and expiated by penance; that for them
the merits of him who died for the sins of the whole world were of
little or of no avail.

Therefore, in perpetual fear of punishment hereafter, they set their
whole minds to punish themselves on earth, always tortured by the
dread that they were not punishing themselves enough, till they
crushed down alike body, mind, and soul into an abject superstition,
the details of which are too repulsive to be written here. Some of
the instances of this self-invented misery which are recorded, even
as early as the time of Theodoret, bishop of Cyra, in the middle of
the fifth century, make us wonder at the puzzling inconsistencies of
the human mind. Did these poor creatures really believe that God
could be propitiated by the torture of his own creatures? What
sense could Theodoret (who was a good man himself) have put upon the
words, "God is good," or "God is love," while he was looking with