luxury, intrigue and party spirit, and had become the flatterers of
fine ladies, "silly women laden with sins, ever learning, and never
coming to the knowledge of the truth." Such a state of things not
only drove poor creatures into the desert, like that fair woman whom
the robber met, but it raised up bands of robbers over the whole of
Europe, Africa, and the East,--men who, like Robin Hood and the
outlaws of the Middle Age, getting no justice from man, broke loose
from society, and while they plundered their oppressors, kept up
some sort of rude justice and humanity among themselves. Many, too,
fled, and became robbers, to escape the merciless conscription which
carried off from every province the flower of the young men, to shed
their blood on foreign battle-fields. In time, too, many of these
conscripts became monks, and the great monasteries of Scetis and
Nitria were hunted over again and again by officers and soldiers
from the neighbouring city of Alexandria in search of young men who
had entered the "spiritual warfare" to escape the earthly one. And
as a background to all this seething heap of decay, misrule, and
misery, hung the black cloud of the barbarians, the Teutonic tribes
from whom we derive the best part of our blood, ever coming nearer
and nearer, waxing stronger and stronger, learning discipline and
civilization by serving in the Roman armies, alternately the allies
and the enemies of the Emperors, rising, some of them, to the
highest offices of State, and destined, so the wisest Romans saw all
the more clearly as the years rolled on, to be soon the conquerors
of the Caesars, and the masters of the Western world.

No wonder if that, in such a state of things, there arose such
violent contrasts to the general weakness, such eccentric protests
against the general wickedness, as may be seen in the figure of
Abbot Paphnutius, when compared either with the poor man tortured in