ascetic tendencies of the previous period, and in opposition to the prevailing secular- ization of Christianity, sought to save the virgin purity of the church and the glory of martyrdom by retreat ft*om the world into the wilderness ; and it carried the ascetic principle to the summit of moral heroism, though not rarely to the borders of fanaticism and brutish stupefaction. It spread with incredible rapidity and iiTesistible fascination from Egypt over the whole chm'ch, east and west, and received the sanction of the greatest church teachers, of an Athanasius, a Basil, a Chrysostom, an Augustine, a Jerome, as the surest and shortest way to heaven. 6 THIRD PEKIOD. A.D. 311-590. , It soon became a powerful rival of the priesthood, and formed a third order, between the priesthood and the laity. The more extraordinary and eccentric the religion of the anchorets and monks, the more they were venerated among the people. The whole conception of the Christian life from the fourth to the sixteenth centm*y is pervaded with the ascetic and monastic spu'it, and pays the highest admiration to the voluntary celi- bacy, poverty, absolute obedience, and excessive self-punish- ments of the pillar-saints and the martyrs of the desert ; while in the same degree the modest virtues of every-day household and social life are looked upon as an inferior degree of morality. In this point the old Catholic ethical ideas essentially differ from those of evangelical Protestantism and modern civilization. But, to understand and appreciate them, we must consider them in connection with the corrupt social condition of the rapidly decaying empire of Rome. The Christian spirit in that age, in just its most earnest and vigorous forms, felt com- pelled to assume in some measure an anti-social, seclusive character, and to prepare itself in the school of privation and solitude for the work of transforming the world and founding a new Christian order of society upon the ruins of the ancient jieathenism. In the development of doctrine the ISTicene and post-Nicene age is second in productiveness and importance only to those of the apostles and of the reformation. It is the classical period for the objective fundamental dogmas, which constitute the ecu- menical or old CathoKc confession of faith. The Greek church produced the symbolical definition of the orthodox view of the holy Trinity and the person of Christ, while the Latin church made considerable advance with the anthropological and sote- riological doctrines of sin and grace. The fourth and fifth centm-ies produced the greatest church fathers, Athanasius and Chrysostom in the East, Jerome and Augustine in the "West. All learning and science now came into the service of tlie c^hurch, and all classes of society, from the emperor to the artisan, took the liveliest, even a passionate interest, in the theological controversies. Now, too, for the first time, could ecumenical councils be held, in which the chm'ch of the whole § 1. mTRODTJCTION AND GENERAL VIEW. 7 Roman empire was represented, and fixed its articles