to a voluntary martyr- dom, a gradual self-destruction, a sort of religious suicide. In the burning deserts and awful caverns of Egypt and Syria, amidst the pains of self-torture, the mortification of natural desires, and relentless battles with hellish monsters, the ascetics now sought to win the crown of heavenly glory, which their prede- cessors in the times of persecution had more quickly and easily gained by a bloody death. The native land of the monastic life was Egypt, the land where Oriental and Grecian literature, philosophy, and religion, Christian orthodoxy and Gnostic heresy, met both in friendship and in hostility. Monasticism was favored and promoted here by climate and geographic features, by the oasis-like seclusion of the country, by the bold contrast of barren deserts with the fertile valley of the I*Tile, by the superstition, the contemplative turn, and the passive endurance of the national character, by the example of the Therapeutse, and by the moral principles of the Alexandrian fathers ; especially by Origen's theory of a higher and lower morality and of the merit of vohmtary pov- erty and celibacy. -^^Elian says of the Egyptians, that they bear the most exquisite torture without a murmur, and would rather be tormented to death than compromise truth. Such natures, once seized with religious enthusiasm, were eminently qualified for saints of the desert. ' Lactantius says it wafl necessary to buy even the liberty of breathing, and ac- cording to Zosimus (Hist. ii. 38) the fathers prostituted their daughters to haye means to pay their tax. 156 THnJD PERIOD. A.D. 311-590. § 29. Development of 3£onasticism. In the historical development of the monastic institution we must distinguish four stages. The first three were com- pleted in the fourth century ; the remaining one reached, ma- turity in the Latin church of the middle age. The first stage is an ascetic life as yet not organized nor separated from the church. It comes down from the ante- Nicene age, and has been already noticed. It now took the form, for the most part, of either hermit or ccenobite life, but continued in the church itself, especially among the clero:y, who might be called half monks. The second stage is hermit life or anchoretism.' It arose in the beginning of the fourth century, gave asceticism a fixed and 23ermanent shape, and pushed it to even external separa- tion from the world. It took the prophets Elijah and John the Baptist for its models, and went beyond them. Not content with partial and temporary retirement from common life, which may be united with social intercourse and useful labors, the consistent anchoret secludes himself from all society, even from kindred ascetics, and comes only exceptionally into contact with human afi^airs, either to receive the visits of admirers of ever}'" class, especially of the sick and the needy (which were very frequent in the case of the more celebrated monks), or to appear in the cities on some extraordinary occasion, as a spirit from another